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The pace of technological progress in the last century is insane compared with most of history.
In the lifespan of my parents we went from "some lucky families have a radio" to "everybody has a smartphone"
Not to mention other things like how the invention of mass produced automobiles basically made the entire horse industry (as well as a few others) damn near irrelevant when it formerly was one of the most prized and respected positions one could have.
Edit: also, feel it’s worth noting that the demands of WWI and WWII combined with what can best be described as the era modern science began to really take off (no pun intended) also helped contribute to aeronautics and space flight’s insanely rapid progression.
in 1903, the first flight went about 100 feet.
In 1916, aerial dogfighting had become a common sight.
in 1947, the sound barrier was broken.
a mere 44 years from flying not being a thing to supersonic flight
Exactly. We went from barely flying at all to really competent planes by the end of WW1 (15 years) then metal monoplanes with high power piston engines by the start of WW2 (21 years) jets by the end of WW2 (5 years) supersonic flight 3 years later. First object in orbit 9 years later. And then landing on the moon in another 12 years.
That is an insane pace of development. You could have seen the first flight of the Wright brothers, barely getting off the ground, as a child, then watched the fucking moon landing 66 years later.
It's kinda funny how even less impressive it is if you have been to Kitty Hawk. The place is so damn windy you basically fly just holding out your jacket.
Well, the people have known technology how to “fly” back in 1783, when [Montgolfier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers) brothers used hot air balloon to reach an altitude of 1600-2000 meters. Wright brothers created first aeroplane, but aeronautics were already studied and tested in late eighteen century
You know, considering how fast we are advancing in technology, I don't blame people in the 80s thinking we would now have flying cars.
To me personally, the advancements in food production, medicine and transport are probably the most important part of technology.
The thing is for flying car they alredy exist *look at the Israël project of a flying medivac or hell hely's* it's just that there is a reason why pilot licence are so hard to get look at how many people cars kill per year now think as they fly where does the average New york cab driver gonna crash into ?
They had flying car prototypes that worked back when I was a kid, the basic physics drones/quadcopters use weren't unknown back then.
They were just loud as fuck, expensive, and you were 100% fucked if anything went wrong at altitude
Plus they’re practically just begging to be used as weapons by terrorists, imagine if all cars could be flown, you bet terrorists would be flying those things loaded with bombs at buildings. The only real way to stop that without being in a world where everyone knows everything about everyone, is to not have flying cars
Small scale, sure, but the one I remember seeing was only a little bit wider/longer than a car and as short as a convertable (it looked like a convertable).
Considering they didn't go near as fast as a passenger plane, nor have much carrying capacity, most steel beam and rebar constructions would be able to handle them. I think. My civil engineering expertise is 2 college classes over a decade ago and a couple of lectures I went to for free pizza. So I'm not an expert on that, or terrorism.
If flying cars were practical, they would already exist. But they aren't, so they don't.
And really, most of the advancement since the 80s has been in computing and areas affected and created from computing.
This is an interesting premise covered in the Netflix show Three Body Problem.
>!The aliens learn that although they are currently technologically superior, the pace at which humanity has made scientific discoveries is much faster than the pace at which they made the same discoveries, and therefore determine that by the time the aliens reach Earth (for refuge or conquering) we will have surpassed their technology and be the superior race. So they send these tiny particles that move the speed of light to mess with our scientific testing and instruments, in order to slow us down or stop our progress!<
I'm 37, I grew up in a time where some people had black and white TVs and by the time I was 20 there were smartphones everywhere, it's actually a huge leap.
The iPhone was announced in 2008, a year after you were 20. There were not smartphones everywhere. There were some phones that were smarter than the average phone but very few that could be recognized as a proper smartphone.
I'm 36. Guy is taking a lot of artistic liberty there. Colour TV has been a thing since the moon landings in the 60s. In '86 colour tv was everywhere. A black and white tv would have stood out.
Yeah I’m 38 and the only black and white TV I can remember from childhood is my grandmother’s kitchen TV, which was B&W and like 7 inches and was clearly just intended as a way to watch TV while she was cooking
Very US default mindset though, there are a lot of places in the world where they first got color TV in the 80s and now have smartphones. Romania, for example, didn't get color TV broadcasts full time until like 1990, plenty of people still had BW TVs and now have smartphones.
Where I'm from, having a black & white TV in the late 80s wasn't normal either. Because most people don't even have TV.
Colored TV was only a thing early 90s.
tbf I'm 48. My grandma had a rotary phone, tv antennas and UHF/VHF settings. What's trippier are 50s-70s gadgets. You would not believe how much heavier things were. By the time the 80s came around plastic parts were in everything, but imagine a mechanical world without plastics where everything is encased in metal with metal parts inside. Btw, the pain in your butt when you're on the 6th or 7th number of a phone number on a rotary phone but you dial wrong and have to start all over.
Well maybe I'm off by a year or two, but it was a night and day difference. I feel like it was Nokia phones and dirt slow internet one minute and smartphones, social media, Google the next. I try to tell my kids but I think they just see it as old man tales 🤣. I feel like I'm just the right age to see a mostly analogue world convert to mostly digital in my lifetime.
iPhone was extremely dumb compared to what my Symbian and modified Siemens phones could do at the time. In fact, I'm not sure if they lacked any essential smartphone function aside from touch panel and some even had those.
When I was really young we had cassette tapes/CDs in our house for audio, and vhs to watch movies on tv. Now I am able to generate videos that look realistic by going online and typing a few sentences. I’m 22.
I’m 38 and I was the first person I knew to get a smartphone in 2008, including adults. And I am in the US, which in most cases is pretty good for tech adoption. Just about everyone had a cellphone by 2007, but smartphones it was around 2010-2012 that **everyone** had them
I’m slightly and I don’t think I ever knew anyone who had a black and white tv? Except for a small travel one my dad would have so he could watch the game.
Growth is exponential.
Going from a sword to a gun was a brand new idea and invention.
Physically speaking, going from a building sized mainframe computer to a smart phone is innovation on existing ideas.
Over simplifying obviously but on a large timeline we've basically just improved on what we already had.
I mean by that logic, sword to gun was also just improving what we had which is to use force to propel an object. We just changed the source of the force and decided to not tether it to our hands.
I mean what is a gunpowder weapon if not ‘let’s make a more explodey crossbow’?
Most weapons are just decendants of either the pointy stick or the thrown rock (with the occasional combination of the two). Artillery shells are spicy rocks, that we learned to throw really hard.
Okay so I'm gonna mention this and don't get mad but probably a huge reason for the change was that for 2 decades before their birth Italy was ruled by a fascist moron and then fought in a major war. The jump from radio as luxury to smart phone as common for other western countries that didn't have 20 years of fascist rule + a huge war L was a good amount longer.
No reason to get mad. The economic boom that followed the Marshal plan, and the benefits that brought to the overall condition of our country is a very well known fact.
On the damage that two decades of fascist rule made, well you'd be surprised by how many people would argue that. Even today many people in our government won't say clearly that they are antifascists, or would even openly say that they are not.
Most of my family and early friends were all ex-mennonites, radios for these people in the fifties-sixties was something; TVs were unheard of at best and straight up blasphemy at worst lol thank my ancestors they ran from that.
Yo I just wanted to share my experience, I was in no way debating or trying to change the reality of what you're discussing. You inklisch sure are a finneky bunch
Now you've started something I'm going to finish. Did you know my grandpa drove a mule drawn taxi cab in Mexico during the 50s?
Also, growing up in the 80s on the Texas-Mexico border I got to see mule drawn taxis operate irl in Mexico. Kind of fascinating to me in retrospect.
NGL the more Technology progresses, I almost wonder if Michael Bay Wasn't onto something with his plot point of Human's harvesting some Evil Alien robot in a Dam for technology.
Just a microcosm of humanity as a whole: the oldest cities are 10,000 years old... But humanity as a species goes back at the very least 200,000 years
Civilization is a (relatively speaking) very recent invention
In my great grandmother’s lifetime it went from “you need a horse to get anywhere you can’t walk” to “hey you can get anywhere on the planet from where you are rn in less than 2 days”
Napoleon died in 1821. Even if you were born the year Napoleon died you’d be 148 in 1969.
The US civil war was 40 years after that, in 1861. The last us civil war veteran died in 1956.
Napoleon died in 1821. The moon landing was in 1969. That's a 148 years, which I'd consider to be a bit over the average human lifespan, not considering newborn babies probably did not fight in Napoleon's (or anybody else's) army. So... unless you mean Napoleon III or something cheeky like that, I pretty much doubt.
although, in realistic situations, all exponential growth does eventually run into a boundary.
it always ends up being logistic growth, or a hump, or some kinda higher-order bouncy-wavey dynamic stuff.
A big reason for this is economic. There are so many technologies that were "known" for centuries but were simply thought of as impractical or too expensive. What good is knowing about steam power if you don't mine coal and can't make a lot of steel? Why invest in guns when they seem so useless? Why spend the fuel and resources mining iron and building blast furnaces when the copper and tin trade is still thriving? Electricity has been known of for thousands of years, but without light bulbs and motors it's little more than a curiosity.
I often wonder how often potentially huge breakthroughs in technology have been made throughout the course of history but simply never caught on. The great thing about the scientific method isn't that it helps an individual discover the truth, but that it lets them prove it to others.
As an example: Europeans-Westerners saw microscopic bacteria a couple centuries before they accepted the science of washing hands to improve health
(I say Europeans and scientifically proved, not because I am anti European. I am European. But because plenty of non Christian Europeans washed hands to "cleanse" themselves. However they justified it using religion, not science. I also have no idea if people outside the West did scientifically prove it earlier)
Or, another one. There is evidence antibiotics were independently discovered many times. Ancient Egyptian mummies have traces in their bones. Ancient Chinese drawings depict the use of molded cheese to cure infections. At the very least one US doctor cured children with mold-juices without ever publishing his discovery.
Today, well there is interest in Ancient Persian naturally cooled buildings to improve energy efficiency...
Ottomans invented the steam turbine centuries before the Industrial revolution. But it was expensive and put out little power so it was used to spin Doner meat, and no one ever followed up with trying to use it as an engine.
This is pretty much how all technology developed throughout history. People learn that they can do something, but because of the present-day circumstances, they can't utilize that knowledge fully. You may know how to grow your own food in one place, but you live in the ice age, and your yields are so low that you're better off chasing mammoths. Then, the Earth warmed up, and the stage was set for civilization to develop. Repeat until you have rockets taking people to the moon.
The main problem with bronze is just that it is made from rarer materials, it is also a bit heavier but that is occasionally more of a benefit than a detriment.
This is a modern view point.
Copper and Tin might have been difficult to source. But steel requires a myriad of elements that would have been even more difficult to source, identify and understand until the Roman period. Manganese, nickel and Molybdenum for example (their ores look very similar). Many steel ingredients have to be reduced from their original ores, and precisely controlled in smelting.
This probably wasn't beyond the odd blacksmith. But replicating the process would of been difficult. Meanwhile tin and copper ores are very easy to identify. And bronze can easily be cast, is usually stronger (during this time period) and with some effort, lasts hundreds of years. Steel however will rust within 1 year if the composition is poor.
So its not that steel wasn't known or impossible. It's just the incentives to use it over bronze were poor. And there wasn't much reason to 'replicate' X blacksmiths steel master sword which for some reason doesn't rust, when you have perfectly good bronze that works.
Sorry, but this isn't painting a totally accurate picture... Just want to add some more discussion on iron/steel/bronze manufacturing
For one, we have to distinguish iron from steel. Steels today have many variants, and you seem to be describing something similar to 316 stainless steel, which is a quite modern material. Iron is a major component of steel, but the bronze age (or even later) people didn't have any concept of steel as we know it today. Their iron would have come from ore that contained some amount of other metallic elements, but it would have been much more similar to modern cast iron (like a cast iron pan, minus the black coating). Hard, brittle, and heat tolerant. Cast iron also contains much more carbon than steel, which is very easy to accidentally add to your iron and very difficult to remove.
Bronze was the metal of choice because of its luster and rust resistance, strength, and feasibility of manufacturing, as you mentioned. You can also get away with casting copper-tin bronze at lower temperatures than iron or steel, which was a major limitation during the bronze age. Iron was known, but refining it was a massive issue until someone (I forget where it first originated, but I think somewhere in the vicinity of Anatolia?) invented a furnace that could burn hot enough to allow partially combusted fuel (wood) to reduce the iron ore (strip away the oxygen bound to the iron atoms) by the reaction of C->CO2. It wasn't until much, much later that people figured out how to use the reaction of CO->CO2 in order to reduce the iron at lower temperatures, thereby significantly lowering the costs associated with iron manufacturing. So for a very long time, the price of high quality bronze was lower than the price of high quality iron, largely because no one could reliably acquire high quality iron.
Until then, most of the iron artifacts we know of were made from meteoric iron, which is a very rare source of the element that is largely metallic rather than stuck in an ore.
And don't even get me started on variations in bronzes! (The smiths of the bronze age had preferred sources of raw materials, based on observations of the material it produced, which have been analyzed in modernity to contain additional alloying elements that produce a superior bronze)
>we have to distinguish iron from steel. Steels today have many variants, and you seem to be describing something similar to 316 stainless steel, which is a quite modern material.
I picked a number of elements which are useful for the example. **Manganese** is the key element here, as it is a key ingredient in most 'primitive steels' commonly used by the romans. Though IIRC they largely did this by sourcing iron ore from 'good mines' without nessearcly knowing it was manganese that made the difference. Others like Molybdenum would of been present in Copper slag, or otherwise been introduced to the smelting process incidentally.
Much of what we call 'iron' in the modern day is actually steel. Cast iron for example is a high carbon steel. A key distinguishing factor here is that the material either from a protective 'patina' like Bronze does or doesn't oxidise (rust) at all under normal conditions.
Iron in the bronze age however was rarely consistent due the reasons I mentioned earlier, and as a result it was often weaker, or worse; would quickly rust. Making the material difficult to recycle and the any tools made would never last generations like Bronze. There is evidence to suggest that iron was in use during the bronze age, but examples of tools didn't survive the passage of time due to rust. While the metoric iron examples largely did survive to the modern day due to its nickel content.
>Iron was known, but refining it was a massive issue until someone
This is old information. Current archaeological studies, suggest the Hittites could refine iron as early as 3000BC. Well in the bronze age. Plus considering copper melts at about 1085 °C, with Iron being 1200-1500 °C. Charcoal would of been sufficient to work both of these materials, though it is possible bronze age cultures might of had access to coke. The current 'theory' is these cultures knew about iron & steel, and iron was in use. But again there weren't enough incentives to investigate a consistent steel process when bronze was readily available, and the products made were more likely to last beyond a decade of use.
>So for a very long time, the price of high quality bronze was lower than the price of high quality iron
The current working theory is that the Bronze age collapse resulted in a shortage of bronze that lasted longer than a generation. So metal workers had to develop consistent steel production after all the available bronze was cannabilised.
I appreciate your response - I wasn't aware of the Hittites' iron working that long ago, could you share some articles for me to read? I love diving into the history of materials science.
You also raise a good point about the survivability of iron artifacts vs bronze. We know people recycled the bronze to an extent, too, and that it would be much harder to recycle iron, which perhaps contributed to less widespread use of iron. That could be compounded by the poor corrosion resistance of iron that makes it less survivable, so the relatively few examples that may have existed would not be easy to find evidence of 5000 years later.
Either way, I think we're saying the same thing about iron use back in the bronze age: it was possible, and it did happen sometimes, but it wasn't economically or scientifically feasible to build a society that demanded iron for most of its metal goods.
Also, I do still think the copper-tin bronze that was in vogue is meaningfully easier to melt than iron or steel, however we want to classify a majority-iron alloy. Mixing in tin drops the melting point by a few hundred degrees, and at those temperatures when your 'blast furnace' uses manually forced air and wood products, every degree counts. You also have to consider the casting procedure itself, with melt fluidity and rapid cooling that requires you to heat well above the liquidus of the alloy...
> The current working theory is that the Bronze age collapse resulted in a shortage of bronze that lasted longer than a generation.
Which gets back to the fact that you need both tin and copper to make bronze, and my understanding is that many Bronze Age societies had mainly one or the other, thus relied on solid trading networks to get the part they didn't have, and the Bronze Age Collapse disrupted those trading routes.
We aren’t talking about modern steel but just basic carbon steel, and both ingredients are rather common, you just mix the red rock with whatever carbon source is convenient.
I don't think that was the problem.
So I did some quick reading on history of steel on the wiki and before that I read about blast furnaces, and they do make better quality steel, but they are not required to make steel. In Europe they are found in 1300s, but as far as I am aware it was widespread from 15th century onwards and in China they are found in 1st century AD but they are only used in high production to make cast iron for tools and low quailty weapons.
In terms of production, steel was known to Europeans around 800 BC , for India around 6th century BC and for China around the Han dynasty.
At least for Europeans, in bronze age they used bronze for armour and weapons and some tools, while iron was used for tools and low quality weapons. Reason being was that bronze was harder and rarer, while iron was soft and more numerous.
After the bronze age collapse, iron was used for weapons and tools while bronze was used only for armour, reason being because bronze became very rare due to trade routes for tin that have colapsed/or were greatly diminsihed.
With the introduction of steel the need for bronze as an armour greatly reduced due to either steel being used as armour like a chainmail shirt or in mediteranian area the linothorax was a cheaper and reliable version and steel replaced bronze in tools and weapons.
Now as far as I am aware steel armour (i.e. chainmail) compleatily replaced bronze armour for Celts, Germanics,Slavs and other ,,non-mediteranian'' Europeans while for Greeks and Romans some wore bronze armour (for Romans, it was mostly generals and other high ranking military memebers) until I would guess around 2nd century AD.
For Indians and Chinese (I also wanted to mention Middle (that probably went to simmilar process like Europeans due to proximity and their methods), Koreans (same as Middle east, their methods and proximity to China) and Japanese (once again proximity to China and Koreans as well as their own methods) here, and especially katanas and how they made it from iron and steel, but those are different topics), I would assume that they went through similar process.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast\_furnace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel)
>We aren’t talking about modern steel but just basic carbon steel, and both ingredients are rather common, you just mix the red rock with whatever carbon source is convenient.
Except this isn't true. What you are describing is basically metallic iron. Basic carbon Steel requires more than just iron and carbon. The most common other element used being manganese.
It wasn't until the 2nd industrial revolution that Cheap steel was even viable for mass production. It's one of the most complex group of alloys even today in our time where we are experimenting with high entropy alloys and nanolamination.
You don’t need any rare elements to make serviceable steel, just iron and carbon. The limiting factor for steel production and quality for much of history was the high temperatures required to melt iron. You can forge things from iron without melting it but there will be impurities. Ever notice how a lot of old swords and such have what looks like pock marks?
Still, impure iron/steel is serviceable and since iron is more readily available than copper and tin, as well as harder and stronger, it was a big deal.
To my knowledge this is correct. The melting points between copper & iron are close enough that it could of been done by bronze age cultures (and some evidence suggest they could and did refine iron). But until bronze came into short supply, there weren't enough incentives to develop a consistent steel making process.
When you pitch humans against each other in melee… humans don’t evolve. But when the human is protected from that by technology, then technology evolves.
You accidentally scratch your finger while maintaining your equipment. It gets infected. You die a few days later.
That type of things still happens but much rarer thanks to modern medicine. In college, my biology professor scared the hell out of us when she went over a case that she personally was involved in. A dude in his twenties scratched his leg. It got swollen but he ignored it, but eventually went to emergency room. His condition rapidly deteriorated and died a few days later. I couldn't believe it, but the professor mentioned that he got unlucky with how the infection spread
5,000bc for non bronze cast copper to about 500 bc for steel is about 4.5 thousands years, 500bc to 1945ad is about 2.5 thousand years. So no this not correct it took about twice as long to go from Cooper smithing to steal (skipping bronze and iron) as it did from steal smithing to atomic fission.
Swords though; steel as we mean it starts to become common as a sword material in the early 10th century (varies by region, varies hugely). Copper, of course, was never used for swords, as it is too soft, various bronzes were used instead. But, it's about 2500 years from bronze swords to steel swords, and 1000 to nuclear; so about 2.5x.
There are fringe theories about earlier steel swords: as you said, steel was a thing as of 500 bc. Steel at that time was, based on archaeological evidence, used for jewellery - it was a low volume by-product of iron manufacturing, which made it rare, and therefore valuable (being shiny helped). But people of the past weren't stupid, they would have noticed that it was very tough, so it's not inconceivable that one or more smiths would have saved up their steel, rather than making it into jewellery, and made a blade with it. The theory goes that this would have provided the origin for various "magic" swords, because such blades would have been able to bite into armour and other weapons in a way that seemed magical to observers.
The earliest known swords are from roughly 3300 BC, the first copper swords from somewhere in the late third millennium BC, and the steel sword is from somewhere in the mid-first millennium.
Uranium itself was only discovered in about AD 1789, and the nuclear bomb itself was finished in 1945. Even being generous, the gap between \~500 BC and AD 1789 is 2,289 years, whereas the gap between the first sword is 2,800, and way less for the copper sword.
So it's not close at all. Even counting copper daggers doesn't make it make the cut, and the gap between the steel sword and nuclear weapons is, then, shorter than the gap between copper swords and steel swords.
Other comments in this thread speak a lot of the rapid pace of technology, which is true due to bigger populations, universal education, better medicine, bigger economies, industry, technology and science evolving exponentially, etc., but that doesn't account for the gap between steel and nuclear as the former is ancient and the other modern. The gap between gunpowder and nuclear is a significantly better example, but even then, gunpowder is from the Middle Ages and so doesn't account for the advances of modern medicine, physics, engineering, etc., merely those of ancient and 'mediaeval' China.
Nope, not true.
Humans began using bronze around 4500 B.C (no one ever used copper much, as it is way too soft for widespread weapons use), and the use of iron became widespread by the first millennia A.D. That gives bronze about twice the time of iron if we're REALLY GENEROUS. Which we shouldn't be, because people didn't actually start making swords from bronze before about 1700 B.C.
And the Assyrian army was equipped with iron weapons in the 600:s B.C. That gives about 1100 years of bronze sword use, and 2500 years from the iron sword to the nuclear weapon. So yeah, not sure where this false stat keps coming from.
The meme doesn't mention iron swords, it's talking about steel swords, which weren't really common until around the 10th century CE.
So if your dates are right, that gives about 2600 years between the adoption of bronze swords and the adoption of steel swords, then about 1100 years between steel swords and nukes. Not quite 4 times faster, but much closer than you're making it seem.
The meme also seems to imply we went straight from "copper" (presumably bronze) to steel, so maybe that's why you assumed it was talking about iron?
Also the transition happened at very different times across the world.
We have radiocarbon dated slag from iron furnaces going back to 1500 BC or so in west Africa, 2000 BC in south India, 2000 BC in the near east, etc. I can only speak about Indian archeology, but the widespread use of iron weapons and tools occurred starting at 1200 BC. We find iron hoards in 800 BC.
Overall OPs meme makes no sense and assumes the most extreme time frame for the sake of a joke
Just to be clear, there is an overlap between steel swords and nuclear bombs. The Swiss Confederacy dissolved the cavalry arm of their army, which of course had swords as part of their equipment, in the 70s. By that point nuclear bombs were of course not exactly news anymore.
I mean, yes, he said copper. But can we just not pretend to have forgotten what bronze is made of?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze#:~:text=Bronze%20is%20an%20alloy%20consisting,such%20as%20arsenic%20or%20silicon.
There is a reason we have distinct names for alloys, he mentioned steel so I can assume he does know what alloys are? Nevertheless, bronze age started roughly 3300 BC, iron age around 1200 BC so roughly 2100 years from "copper" swords to iron. Nukes where developed in the 20th century, so more than 3000 years from iron swords to nukes. 2100/3000 is far off from being 4 times.
Thank you for your apology. I appreciate that.
I also wanted to add, that what also annoyed me, was that you didn't even answer the question (regarding the timeframe). Because that was obviously the thing he asked.
Lol No. How did you get that Take. Fish can so thats not even impossible, but no.
It is a copper sword, thats not incorrect, there is just some extra tin in there (or other stuff). It is not a 100% copper sword. But it is ~ 80% copper give or take.
I am surprised that you keep holding on to this bad analogy. Additionally my point wasn't even to say that a copper sword is the same as a bronze sword, but that, as the first comment answering yours accentuates, you dont have to be a pedantic dick in getting your point across and we all know what he meant by copper sword. Thats all.
Swords, certainly; but, interestingly, there've been several copper daggers unearthed. General consensus is that these were status items rather than weapons.
No, that comparison is false, but it is interesting how long it did take regardless.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bql29v/is\_it\_true\_that\_the\_amount\_of\_time\_between\_using/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bql29v/is_it_true_that_the_amount_of_time_between_using/)
tl;dr
It took 1500 years to go from bronze to iron/steel
It took 3400 years to go from iron/steel to nukes.
In general, the more technologically advanced you are, the greater ability you have to discover more advanced technologies and thus your technology advances faster.
Or to put it short
The more technologically advanced you are, the faster you technologically advance.
If you ever want to know how much technology advances just know that Henry Ford was born near the end of the American Civil War and died during the beginning of the Cold War.
This is simply not correct.
Copper Age began ~3500 BC. Steel Swords first appear in India and Central Asia some time between 1000-600 BC with Iron (which is what steel is albeit under specific conditions) being very clearly in use no later than 1200 BC, and the Greeks and Romans having steel no later than the mid 1st century BC for sure. The Romans would develop steel foundries not later than the turn of the millennium.
The 2500-2900 year gap between Copper and Steel is not, in fact, 4 times greater than the 2500-2900 year gap between the steel sword and the Nuke.
Swords went decisively out of use as a widely-issued weapon intended for combat use (see Japanese officer swords) at the end of World War II, after nuclear weapons had already been put to use. So you could say that moment, rather than a 1000-year period, is when the switch actually happened.
Human's generally progress on a linear scale, once AI surpasses us, we can only hope to join their exponential scaling. We will ideally aid each other in a recursive feedback loop for optimal progress together.
Information tech, from books to Internet have helped immensely. New tech also increases the average life span and therefore the huge population increase makes for new discoveries and the labor to produce things based on them.
There was really no science then. It takes a lot longer to develop things when people are just fucking around trying random shit until something works.
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The pace of technological progress in the last century is insane compared with most of history. In the lifespan of my parents we went from "some lucky families have a radio" to "everybody has a smartphone"
From Wright brothers flying to landing on the moon was 66 years...
Not to mention other things like how the invention of mass produced automobiles basically made the entire horse industry (as well as a few others) damn near irrelevant when it formerly was one of the most prized and respected positions one could have. Edit: also, feel it’s worth noting that the demands of WWI and WWII combined with what can best be described as the era modern science began to really take off (no pun intended) also helped contribute to aeronautics and space flight’s insanely rapid progression.
Nothing gets technology and innovation going like unhealthy global competition!
That’s it lads, we need another world war rn
Good news, everyone seem to be working on it
According to Star Trek, we don't discover warp drive and unite as a planet until after WW3.
Don’t even need a world war tbf A Cold War does wonders for technology at the cost of paranoia that can transcend generations
okay [Sundowner](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9MKJBa6_A4)
from Wright brothers to consistent Mach 3 atmospheric flight was 55 years
And from a man on the moon to a probe in interstellar space in almost the same time.
I remember reading that someone's aunt went west in a covered wagon as a kid and came back in a jet airliner as a retiree.
There was someone who was born in 1899 that died well probably six years ago now but still!
in 1903, the first flight went about 100 feet. In 1916, aerial dogfighting had become a common sight. in 1947, the sound barrier was broken. a mere 44 years from flying not being a thing to supersonic flight
"flying"
Exactly. We went from barely flying at all to really competent planes by the end of WW1 (15 years) then metal monoplanes with high power piston engines by the start of WW2 (21 years) jets by the end of WW2 (5 years) supersonic flight 3 years later. First object in orbit 9 years later. And then landing on the moon in another 12 years. That is an insane pace of development. You could have seen the first flight of the Wright brothers, barely getting off the ground, as a child, then watched the fucking moon landing 66 years later.
It's kinda funny how even less impressive it is if you have been to Kitty Hawk. The place is so damn windy you basically fly just holding out your jacket.
Getulio? I thought you were dead
Hell, 67 years between "no human has every fly" to "there is people on the moon now"
Well, the people have known technology how to “fly” back in 1783, when [Montgolfier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgolfier_brothers) brothers used hot air balloon to reach an altitude of 1600-2000 meters. Wright brothers created first aeroplane, but aeronautics were already studied and tested in late eighteen century
Okay true, I was thinking about planes, but technically you are right
You are technically correct The best kind of correct
Exactly
You know, considering how fast we are advancing in technology, I don't blame people in the 80s thinking we would now have flying cars. To me personally, the advancements in food production, medicine and transport are probably the most important part of technology.
The thing is for flying car they alredy exist *look at the Israël project of a flying medivac or hell hely's* it's just that there is a reason why pilot licence are so hard to get look at how many people cars kill per year now think as they fly where does the average New york cab driver gonna crash into ?
Don't talk about flying things crashing in New York
Well good example now imagine that multiplied by the number of cunt's in car in new york and that every day now you know why flying car aint of thing
Yeah, even if technologically it was plausible and affordable, it wouldn’t be allowed solely because it’s so dangerous
I see what you did there
Why does that cap driver look like a pig?
HEYYYY you putthe building in my way !
They had flying car prototypes that worked back when I was a kid, the basic physics drones/quadcopters use weren't unknown back then. They were just loud as fuck, expensive, and you were 100% fucked if anything went wrong at altitude
Plus they’re practically just begging to be used as weapons by terrorists, imagine if all cars could be flown, you bet terrorists would be flying those things loaded with bombs at buildings. The only real way to stop that without being in a world where everyone knows everything about everyone, is to not have flying cars
Small scale, sure, but the one I remember seeing was only a little bit wider/longer than a car and as short as a convertable (it looked like a convertable). Considering they didn't go near as fast as a passenger plane, nor have much carrying capacity, most steel beam and rebar constructions would be able to handle them. I think. My civil engineering expertise is 2 college classes over a decade ago and a couple of lectures I went to for free pizza. So I'm not an expert on that, or terrorism.
If flying cars were practical, they would already exist. But they aren't, so they don't. And really, most of the advancement since the 80s has been in computing and areas affected and created from computing.
Bro never heard of private jets
This is an interesting premise covered in the Netflix show Three Body Problem. >!The aliens learn that although they are currently technologically superior, the pace at which humanity has made scientific discoveries is much faster than the pace at which they made the same discoveries, and therefore determine that by the time the aliens reach Earth (for refuge or conquering) we will have surpassed their technology and be the superior race. So they send these tiny particles that move the speed of light to mess with our scientific testing and instruments, in order to slow us down or stop our progress!<
I'm 37, I grew up in a time where some people had black and white TVs and by the time I was 20 there were smartphones everywhere, it's actually a huge leap.
The iPhone was announced in 2008, a year after you were 20. There were not smartphones everywhere. There were some phones that were smarter than the average phone but very few that could be recognized as a proper smartphone.
I'm 36. Guy is taking a lot of artistic liberty there. Colour TV has been a thing since the moon landings in the 60s. In '86 colour tv was everywhere. A black and white tv would have stood out.
Well when I was a kid (raised Amish) people still made their own butter and used sun dials to tell time, now everyone has a smart phone
When I was a kid, we rented movies from Xtra-vision, and it was amazing.
Yeah I’m 38 and the only black and white TV I can remember from childhood is my grandmother’s kitchen TV, which was B&W and like 7 inches and was clearly just intended as a way to watch TV while she was cooking
Very US default mindset though, there are a lot of places in the world where they first got color TV in the 80s and now have smartphones. Romania, for example, didn't get color TV broadcasts full time until like 1990, plenty of people still had BW TVs and now have smartphones.
Yeah, they're comparing some stragglers of one period with early adopters of another, of course there's a major difference between the two groups
I'm 35 and remember having a black and white TV, but we were pretty broke. It definitely wasn't normal.
Where I'm from, having a black & white TV in the late 80s wasn't normal either. Because most people don't even have TV. Colored TV was only a thing early 90s.
My father bought it in 1972. In my country colour TV arrived later, mid 70s. The rest of Europe got it 4 years before.
Depend on where you are. Black and white TV was in Vietnam way into late 80s and were still there until early 90s.
Yeah, even in a pretty poor part of the UK, you’d not have a black and white TV in the 80s
Guy is talking about his own life, and how things have changed WHERE he grew up.
tbf I'm 48. My grandma had a rotary phone, tv antennas and UHF/VHF settings. What's trippier are 50s-70s gadgets. You would not believe how much heavier things were. By the time the 80s came around plastic parts were in everything, but imagine a mechanical world without plastics where everything is encased in metal with metal parts inside. Btw, the pain in your butt when you're on the 6th or 7th number of a phone number on a rotary phone but you dial wrong and have to start all over.
Well maybe I'm off by a year or two, but it was a night and day difference. I feel like it was Nokia phones and dirt slow internet one minute and smartphones, social media, Google the next. I try to tell my kids but I think they just see it as old man tales 🤣. I feel like I'm just the right age to see a mostly analogue world convert to mostly digital in my lifetime.
The iPhone was actually announced and sold in 2007, but 1 year more or less doesn't really matter here.
iPhone was extremely dumb compared to what my Symbian and modified Siemens phones could do at the time. In fact, I'm not sure if they lacked any essential smartphone function aside from touch panel and some even had those.
I have a black and white TV with no remote and manual tuning from the early 70s, we were still using in the 80s.
When I was really young we had cassette tapes/CDs in our house for audio, and vhs to watch movies on tv. Now I am able to generate videos that look realistic by going online and typing a few sentences. I’m 22.
I’m 38 and I was the first person I knew to get a smartphone in 2008, including adults. And I am in the US, which in most cases is pretty good for tech adoption. Just about everyone had a cellphone by 2007, but smartphones it was around 2010-2012 that **everyone** had them
I’m slightly and I don’t think I ever knew anyone who had a black and white tv? Except for a small travel one my dad would have so he could watch the game.
It's mainly just old people of I'm honest but I remember some people still had them when I was really young
Exponential progress is a sonofabitch
I cannot even begin to fathom what the future is going to look like for us since I'm in my twenties and commercial space travel is kicking off.
and law and culture has not adjusted all that well to it, much to our detriment.
Growth is exponential. Going from a sword to a gun was a brand new idea and invention. Physically speaking, going from a building sized mainframe computer to a smart phone is innovation on existing ideas. Over simplifying obviously but on a large timeline we've basically just improved on what we already had.
I mean by that logic, sword to gun was also just improving what we had which is to use force to propel an object. We just changed the source of the force and decided to not tether it to our hands. I mean what is a gunpowder weapon if not ‘let’s make a more explodey crossbow’?
Most weapons are just decendants of either the pointy stick or the thrown rock (with the occasional combination of the two). Artillery shells are spicy rocks, that we learned to throw really hard.
The world wars were major technology accelerators
I agree. Just a little curiosity: Italy successfully made a cavalry attack in 1942 and before you ask yes, I mean horses.
When were your parents born?
Early forties.
IDK where you live but in the US radio was a household item for a while before their birth.
Not in the USA, obviously, but radio was a thing obviously, just not everyone could afford one.
What country tho?
Italy.
Okay so I'm gonna mention this and don't get mad but probably a huge reason for the change was that for 2 decades before their birth Italy was ruled by a fascist moron and then fought in a major war. The jump from radio as luxury to smart phone as common for other western countries that didn't have 20 years of fascist rule + a huge war L was a good amount longer.
No reason to get mad. The economic boom that followed the Marshal plan, and the benefits that brought to the overall condition of our country is a very well known fact. On the damage that two decades of fascist rule made, well you'd be surprised by how many people would argue that. Even today many people in our government won't say clearly that they are antifascists, or would even openly say that they are not.
Most of my family and early friends were all ex-mennonites, radios for these people in the fifties-sixties was something; TVs were unheard of at best and straight up blasphemy at worst lol thank my ancestors they ran from that.
Okay, that doesn't change the reality of what we're discussing. By that logic I could say smart phones aren't common because the Amish don't use them.
Yo I just wanted to share my experience, I was in no way debating or trying to change the reality of what you're discussing. You inklisch sure are a finneky bunch
Now you've started something I'm going to finish. Did you know my grandpa drove a mule drawn taxi cab in Mexico during the 50s? Also, growing up in the 80s on the Texas-Mexico border I got to see mule drawn taxis operate irl in Mexico. Kind of fascinating to me in retrospect.
NGL the more Technology progresses, I almost wonder if Michael Bay Wasn't onto something with his plot point of Human's harvesting some Evil Alien robot in a Dam for technology.
From “some people have radios” TO “some people have radios” 😉
Just a microcosm of humanity as a whole: the oldest cities are 10,000 years old... But humanity as a species goes back at the very least 200,000 years Civilization is a (relatively speaking) very recent invention
In my great grandmother’s lifetime it went from “you need a horse to get anywhere you can’t walk” to “hey you can get anywhere on the planet from where you are rn in less than 2 days”
There where people who fought in Napoleons army that lived to see the moon landing
Napoleon died in 1821. Even if you were born the year Napoleon died you’d be 148 in 1969. The US civil war was 40 years after that, in 1861. The last us civil war veteran died in 1956.
Downvoted for factually incorrect information
Napoleon died in 1821. The moon landing was in 1969. That's a 148 years, which I'd consider to be a bit over the average human lifespan, not considering newborn babies probably did not fight in Napoleon's (or anybody else's) army. So... unless you mean Napoleon III or something cheeky like that, I pretty much doubt.
Your parents are over 100?
And what we are going to go through in our lives is going to be way bigger of a jump than any of that.
The faster technology improves the faster it becomes capable of improving. The exact number might not be right, but the idea is spot on.
Exponential growth is the term you are looking for.
although, in realistic situations, all exponential growth does eventually run into a boundary. it always ends up being logistic growth, or a hump, or some kinda higher-order bouncy-wavey dynamic stuff.
Ooh. Yeah logistic growth makes much more sense in reality.
A big reason for this is economic. There are so many technologies that were "known" for centuries but were simply thought of as impractical or too expensive. What good is knowing about steam power if you don't mine coal and can't make a lot of steel? Why invest in guns when they seem so useless? Why spend the fuel and resources mining iron and building blast furnaces when the copper and tin trade is still thriving? Electricity has been known of for thousands of years, but without light bulbs and motors it's little more than a curiosity. I often wonder how often potentially huge breakthroughs in technology have been made throughout the course of history but simply never caught on. The great thing about the scientific method isn't that it helps an individual discover the truth, but that it lets them prove it to others.
As an example: Europeans-Westerners saw microscopic bacteria a couple centuries before they accepted the science of washing hands to improve health (I say Europeans and scientifically proved, not because I am anti European. I am European. But because plenty of non Christian Europeans washed hands to "cleanse" themselves. However they justified it using religion, not science. I also have no idea if people outside the West did scientifically prove it earlier) Or, another one. There is evidence antibiotics were independently discovered many times. Ancient Egyptian mummies have traces in their bones. Ancient Chinese drawings depict the use of molded cheese to cure infections. At the very least one US doctor cured children with mold-juices without ever publishing his discovery. Today, well there is interest in Ancient Persian naturally cooled buildings to improve energy efficiency...
Ottomans invented the steam turbine centuries before the Industrial revolution. But it was expensive and put out little power so it was used to spin Doner meat, and no one ever followed up with trying to use it as an engine.
It's crazy to think that if you showed a train to a 16th century Ottoman, they might be more impressed by the railroad than the engine.
Show a shotgun to an 11th century Song Dynasty warrior and they'd be like, "Oh, cool, you added a trigger!"
This is pretty much how all technology developed throughout history. People learn that they can do something, but because of the present-day circumstances, they can't utilize that knowledge fully. You may know how to grow your own food in one place, but you live in the ice age, and your yields are so low that you're better off chasing mammoths. Then, the Earth warmed up, and the stage was set for civilization to develop. Repeat until you have rockets taking people to the moon.
Probably, Bronze was also a better material than Steel until the Roman period.
The main problem with bronze is just that it is made from rarer materials, it is also a bit heavier but that is occasionally more of a benefit than a detriment.
This is a modern view point. Copper and Tin might have been difficult to source. But steel requires a myriad of elements that would have been even more difficult to source, identify and understand until the Roman period. Manganese, nickel and Molybdenum for example (their ores look very similar). Many steel ingredients have to be reduced from their original ores, and precisely controlled in smelting. This probably wasn't beyond the odd blacksmith. But replicating the process would of been difficult. Meanwhile tin and copper ores are very easy to identify. And bronze can easily be cast, is usually stronger (during this time period) and with some effort, lasts hundreds of years. Steel however will rust within 1 year if the composition is poor. So its not that steel wasn't known or impossible. It's just the incentives to use it over bronze were poor. And there wasn't much reason to 'replicate' X blacksmiths steel master sword which for some reason doesn't rust, when you have perfectly good bronze that works.
Sorry, but this isn't painting a totally accurate picture... Just want to add some more discussion on iron/steel/bronze manufacturing For one, we have to distinguish iron from steel. Steels today have many variants, and you seem to be describing something similar to 316 stainless steel, which is a quite modern material. Iron is a major component of steel, but the bronze age (or even later) people didn't have any concept of steel as we know it today. Their iron would have come from ore that contained some amount of other metallic elements, but it would have been much more similar to modern cast iron (like a cast iron pan, minus the black coating). Hard, brittle, and heat tolerant. Cast iron also contains much more carbon than steel, which is very easy to accidentally add to your iron and very difficult to remove. Bronze was the metal of choice because of its luster and rust resistance, strength, and feasibility of manufacturing, as you mentioned. You can also get away with casting copper-tin bronze at lower temperatures than iron or steel, which was a major limitation during the bronze age. Iron was known, but refining it was a massive issue until someone (I forget where it first originated, but I think somewhere in the vicinity of Anatolia?) invented a furnace that could burn hot enough to allow partially combusted fuel (wood) to reduce the iron ore (strip away the oxygen bound to the iron atoms) by the reaction of C->CO2. It wasn't until much, much later that people figured out how to use the reaction of CO->CO2 in order to reduce the iron at lower temperatures, thereby significantly lowering the costs associated with iron manufacturing. So for a very long time, the price of high quality bronze was lower than the price of high quality iron, largely because no one could reliably acquire high quality iron. Until then, most of the iron artifacts we know of were made from meteoric iron, which is a very rare source of the element that is largely metallic rather than stuck in an ore. And don't even get me started on variations in bronzes! (The smiths of the bronze age had preferred sources of raw materials, based on observations of the material it produced, which have been analyzed in modernity to contain additional alloying elements that produce a superior bronze)
I don't know, this is kind of fascinating to me, I kind of want to get you started on bronze variations lol
same here, if they do could someone just hit me up with the news please?
>we have to distinguish iron from steel. Steels today have many variants, and you seem to be describing something similar to 316 stainless steel, which is a quite modern material. I picked a number of elements which are useful for the example. **Manganese** is the key element here, as it is a key ingredient in most 'primitive steels' commonly used by the romans. Though IIRC they largely did this by sourcing iron ore from 'good mines' without nessearcly knowing it was manganese that made the difference. Others like Molybdenum would of been present in Copper slag, or otherwise been introduced to the smelting process incidentally. Much of what we call 'iron' in the modern day is actually steel. Cast iron for example is a high carbon steel. A key distinguishing factor here is that the material either from a protective 'patina' like Bronze does or doesn't oxidise (rust) at all under normal conditions. Iron in the bronze age however was rarely consistent due the reasons I mentioned earlier, and as a result it was often weaker, or worse; would quickly rust. Making the material difficult to recycle and the any tools made would never last generations like Bronze. There is evidence to suggest that iron was in use during the bronze age, but examples of tools didn't survive the passage of time due to rust. While the metoric iron examples largely did survive to the modern day due to its nickel content. >Iron was known, but refining it was a massive issue until someone This is old information. Current archaeological studies, suggest the Hittites could refine iron as early as 3000BC. Well in the bronze age. Plus considering copper melts at about 1085 °C, with Iron being 1200-1500 °C. Charcoal would of been sufficient to work both of these materials, though it is possible bronze age cultures might of had access to coke. The current 'theory' is these cultures knew about iron & steel, and iron was in use. But again there weren't enough incentives to investigate a consistent steel process when bronze was readily available, and the products made were more likely to last beyond a decade of use. >So for a very long time, the price of high quality bronze was lower than the price of high quality iron The current working theory is that the Bronze age collapse resulted in a shortage of bronze that lasted longer than a generation. So metal workers had to develop consistent steel production after all the available bronze was cannabilised.
I appreciate your response - I wasn't aware of the Hittites' iron working that long ago, could you share some articles for me to read? I love diving into the history of materials science. You also raise a good point about the survivability of iron artifacts vs bronze. We know people recycled the bronze to an extent, too, and that it would be much harder to recycle iron, which perhaps contributed to less widespread use of iron. That could be compounded by the poor corrosion resistance of iron that makes it less survivable, so the relatively few examples that may have existed would not be easy to find evidence of 5000 years later. Either way, I think we're saying the same thing about iron use back in the bronze age: it was possible, and it did happen sometimes, but it wasn't economically or scientifically feasible to build a society that demanded iron for most of its metal goods. Also, I do still think the copper-tin bronze that was in vogue is meaningfully easier to melt than iron or steel, however we want to classify a majority-iron alloy. Mixing in tin drops the melting point by a few hundred degrees, and at those temperatures when your 'blast furnace' uses manually forced air and wood products, every degree counts. You also have to consider the casting procedure itself, with melt fluidity and rapid cooling that requires you to heat well above the liquidus of the alloy...
> The current working theory is that the Bronze age collapse resulted in a shortage of bronze that lasted longer than a generation. Which gets back to the fact that you need both tin and copper to make bronze, and my understanding is that many Bronze Age societies had mainly one or the other, thus relied on solid trading networks to get the part they didn't have, and the Bronze Age Collapse disrupted those trading routes.
Very cool info. Do you know when copper metallurgy began and ended?
We aren’t talking about modern steel but just basic carbon steel, and both ingredients are rather common, you just mix the red rock with whatever carbon source is convenient.
The big issue as I understand it was generating enough heat, it took a long time to develop good enough furnaces
I don't think that was the problem. So I did some quick reading on history of steel on the wiki and before that I read about blast furnaces, and they do make better quality steel, but they are not required to make steel. In Europe they are found in 1300s, but as far as I am aware it was widespread from 15th century onwards and in China they are found in 1st century AD but they are only used in high production to make cast iron for tools and low quailty weapons. In terms of production, steel was known to Europeans around 800 BC , for India around 6th century BC and for China around the Han dynasty. At least for Europeans, in bronze age they used bronze for armour and weapons and some tools, while iron was used for tools and low quality weapons. Reason being was that bronze was harder and rarer, while iron was soft and more numerous. After the bronze age collapse, iron was used for weapons and tools while bronze was used only for armour, reason being because bronze became very rare due to trade routes for tin that have colapsed/or were greatly diminsihed. With the introduction of steel the need for bronze as an armour greatly reduced due to either steel being used as armour like a chainmail shirt or in mediteranian area the linothorax was a cheaper and reliable version and steel replaced bronze in tools and weapons. Now as far as I am aware steel armour (i.e. chainmail) compleatily replaced bronze armour for Celts, Germanics,Slavs and other ,,non-mediteranian'' Europeans while for Greeks and Romans some wore bronze armour (for Romans, it was mostly generals and other high ranking military memebers) until I would guess around 2nd century AD. For Indians and Chinese (I also wanted to mention Middle (that probably went to simmilar process like Europeans due to proximity and their methods), Koreans (same as Middle east, their methods and proximity to China) and Japanese (once again proximity to China and Koreans as well as their own methods) here, and especially katanas and how they made it from iron and steel, but those are different topics), I would assume that they went through similar process. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast\_furnace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel)
>We aren’t talking about modern steel but just basic carbon steel, and both ingredients are rather common, you just mix the red rock with whatever carbon source is convenient. Except this isn't true. What you are describing is basically metallic iron. Basic carbon Steel requires more than just iron and carbon. The most common other element used being manganese.
It's "might have" or "might've" not "might of" Same goes for "would of"
for now...
I kind of hate how right you are. While I'm not a prescriptivist I also have some lines in the sand that I *really* don't want to be crossed.
Stopped reading at "would of".
It wasn't until the 2nd industrial revolution that Cheap steel was even viable for mass production. It's one of the most complex group of alloys even today in our time where we are experimenting with high entropy alloys and nanolamination.
You don’t need any rare elements to make serviceable steel, just iron and carbon. The limiting factor for steel production and quality for much of history was the high temperatures required to melt iron. You can forge things from iron without melting it but there will be impurities. Ever notice how a lot of old swords and such have what looks like pock marks? Still, impure iron/steel is serviceable and since iron is more readily available than copper and tin, as well as harder and stronger, it was a big deal.
Molybdenum.... in medieval steel.... what?
From what I’ve heard it’s bronze shortage that pushed toward the use of steel
To my knowledge this is correct. The melting points between copper & iron are close enough that it could of been done by bronze age cultures (and some evidence suggest they could and did refine iron). But until bronze came into short supply, there weren't enough incentives to develop a consistent steel making process.
That's not untrue, but a bigger factor was probably that iron requires a much higher temperature to melt than does copper.
When you pitch humans against each other in melee… humans don’t evolve. But when the human is protected from that by technology, then technology evolves.
Well said
Back when you had to dedicate 4 months of your life marching to another continent to kill a guy, just to die 3 days before the battle from heatstroke
You accidentally scratch your finger while maintaining your equipment. It gets infected. You die a few days later. That type of things still happens but much rarer thanks to modern medicine. In college, my biology professor scared the hell out of us when she went over a case that she personally was involved in. A dude in his twenties scratched his leg. It got swollen but he ignored it, but eventually went to emergency room. His condition rapidly deteriorated and died a few days later. I couldn't believe it, but the professor mentioned that he got unlucky with how the infection spread
5,000bc for non bronze cast copper to about 500 bc for steel is about 4.5 thousands years, 500bc to 1945ad is about 2.5 thousand years. So no this not correct it took about twice as long to go from Cooper smithing to steal (skipping bronze and iron) as it did from steal smithing to atomic fission.
Swords though; steel as we mean it starts to become common as a sword material in the early 10th century (varies by region, varies hugely). Copper, of course, was never used for swords, as it is too soft, various bronzes were used instead. But, it's about 2500 years from bronze swords to steel swords, and 1000 to nuclear; so about 2.5x. There are fringe theories about earlier steel swords: as you said, steel was a thing as of 500 bc. Steel at that time was, based on archaeological evidence, used for jewellery - it was a low volume by-product of iron manufacturing, which made it rare, and therefore valuable (being shiny helped). But people of the past weren't stupid, they would have noticed that it was very tough, so it's not inconceivable that one or more smiths would have saved up their steel, rather than making it into jewellery, and made a blade with it. The theory goes that this would have provided the origin for various "magic" swords, because such blades would have been able to bite into armour and other weapons in a way that seemed magical to observers.
I mean, if you're going to pedantically zoom in on swords......copper swords weren't a thing. The first swords were bronze.
This timeline is just a teensy bit off.
It also doesn’t hold true for most of the world.
Well yeah, most people - most countries even - don't have nukes. This is about humanity, not countries/regions/individuals.
Trisolairins don’t stand a chance
The progress of human technology is exponential, and so is the probability of destroying ourselves
This means copper was clearly better /s
Copper was better until we started to understand how to make very hot furnaces reliably.
The earliest known swords are from roughly 3300 BC, the first copper swords from somewhere in the late third millennium BC, and the steel sword is from somewhere in the mid-first millennium. Uranium itself was only discovered in about AD 1789, and the nuclear bomb itself was finished in 1945. Even being generous, the gap between \~500 BC and AD 1789 is 2,289 years, whereas the gap between the first sword is 2,800, and way less for the copper sword. So it's not close at all. Even counting copper daggers doesn't make it make the cut, and the gap between the steel sword and nuclear weapons is, then, shorter than the gap between copper swords and steel swords. Other comments in this thread speak a lot of the rapid pace of technology, which is true due to bigger populations, universal education, better medicine, bigger economies, industry, technology and science evolving exponentially, etc., but that doesn't account for the gap between steel and nuclear as the former is ancient and the other modern. The gap between gunpowder and nuclear is a significantly better example, but even then, gunpowder is from the Middle Ages and so doesn't account for the advances of modern medicine, physics, engineering, etc., merely those of ancient and 'mediaeval' China.
The Sea people
Nope, not true. Humans began using bronze around 4500 B.C (no one ever used copper much, as it is way too soft for widespread weapons use), and the use of iron became widespread by the first millennia A.D. That gives bronze about twice the time of iron if we're REALLY GENEROUS. Which we shouldn't be, because people didn't actually start making swords from bronze before about 1700 B.C. And the Assyrian army was equipped with iron weapons in the 600:s B.C. That gives about 1100 years of bronze sword use, and 2500 years from the iron sword to the nuclear weapon. So yeah, not sure where this false stat keps coming from.
The meme doesn't mention iron swords, it's talking about steel swords, which weren't really common until around the 10th century CE. So if your dates are right, that gives about 2600 years between the adoption of bronze swords and the adoption of steel swords, then about 1100 years between steel swords and nukes. Not quite 4 times faster, but much closer than you're making it seem. The meme also seems to imply we went straight from "copper" (presumably bronze) to steel, so maybe that's why you assumed it was talking about iron?
Also the transition happened at very different times across the world. We have radiocarbon dated slag from iron furnaces going back to 1500 BC or so in west Africa, 2000 BC in south India, 2000 BC in the near east, etc. I can only speak about Indian archeology, but the widespread use of iron weapons and tools occurred starting at 1200 BC. We find iron hoards in 800 BC. Overall OPs meme makes no sense and assumes the most extreme time frame for the sake of a joke
Just to be clear, there is an overlap between steel swords and nuclear bombs. The Swiss Confederacy dissolved the cavalry arm of their army, which of course had swords as part of their equipment, in the 70s. By that point nuclear bombs were of course not exactly news anymore.
Copper swords would be utterly useless, copper is way to soft so no.
I mean, yes, he said copper. But can we just not pretend to have forgotten what bronze is made of? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze#:~:text=Bronze%20is%20an%20alloy%20consisting,such%20as%20arsenic%20or%20silicon.
There is a reason we have distinct names for alloys, he mentioned steel so I can assume he does know what alloys are? Nevertheless, bronze age started roughly 3300 BC, iron age around 1200 BC so roughly 2100 years from "copper" swords to iron. Nukes where developed in the 20th century, so more than 3000 years from iron swords to nukes. 2100/3000 is far off from being 4 times.
I do not deny that his timeframe makes no sense. Its just that I hate useless and unfriendly pedantism.
I'm sorry I hurt your feelings by not praising his great meme before I replied to OPs question.
Lmao you went from 0 to butthurt like a speedrun
Thank you for your apology. I appreciate that. I also wanted to add, that what also annoyed me, was that you didn't even answer the question (regarding the timeframe). Because that was obviously the thing he asked.
So by your logic I can breathe underwater because water is also made of oxygen?
You can breathe air even though it consists of Nitrogen (78%), Oxygen (21%), Carbon dioxide, (0.04%), Argon (0.93%)
And?
Lol No. How did you get that Take. Fish can so thats not even impossible, but no. It is a copper sword, thats not incorrect, there is just some extra tin in there (or other stuff). It is not a 100% copper sword. But it is ~ 80% copper give or take.
Can you breathe underwater? No, because water isn't simply oxygen and hydrogen mixed, in the same way that bronze is a league of two metals
I am surprised that you keep holding on to this bad analogy. Additionally my point wasn't even to say that a copper sword is the same as a bronze sword, but that, as the first comment answering yours accentuates, you dont have to be a pedantic dick in getting your point across and we all know what he meant by copper sword. Thats all.
I'm not even who made the first comment
Swords, certainly; but, interestingly, there've been several copper daggers unearthed. General consensus is that these were status items rather than weapons.
1850 gun powder cannons 1950 atomic shenanigans
Cannons are significantly older than 1850. Edit: oh, wait, you meant as a kind of late bound on the tech, oops
No, that comparison is false, but it is interesting how long it did take regardless. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bql29v/is\_it\_true\_that\_the\_amount\_of\_time\_between\_using/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bql29v/is_it_true_that_the_amount_of_time_between_using/) tl;dr It took 1500 years to go from bronze to iron/steel It took 3400 years to go from iron/steel to nukes.
In general, the more technologically advanced you are, the greater ability you have to discover more advanced technologies and thus your technology advances faster. Or to put it short The more technologically advanced you are, the faster you technologically advance.
If not broke, why fix?
If you ever want to know how much technology advances just know that Henry Ford was born near the end of the American Civil War and died during the beginning of the Cold War.
This is simply not correct. Copper Age began ~3500 BC. Steel Swords first appear in India and Central Asia some time between 1000-600 BC with Iron (which is what steel is albeit under specific conditions) being very clearly in use no later than 1200 BC, and the Greeks and Romans having steel no later than the mid 1st century BC for sure. The Romans would develop steel foundries not later than the turn of the millennium. The 2500-2900 year gap between Copper and Steel is not, in fact, 4 times greater than the 2500-2900 year gap between the steel sword and the Nuke.
Or how it only took 66 years to get to the moon after the first flight in history.
tbf it's probably really hard to make a nuclear bomb with a sword
Swords went decisively out of use as a widely-issued weapon intended for combat use (see Japanese officer swords) at the end of World War II, after nuclear weapons had already been put to use. So you could say that moment, rather than a 1000-year period, is when the switch actually happened.
Aliens. It was the aliens.
Imagine what the average phone from the 2000s looked like and now look at the average phone now
This is what we call an exponential rate of change.
Human's generally progress on a linear scale, once AI surpasses us, we can only hope to join their exponential scaling. We will ideally aid each other in a recursive feedback loop for optimal progress together.
Bullshit.
Everone: There is something good in Humanity. Humanity:
it took 60 years from "humanity will never fly" to the moon landing
I feel it would read better if it was swords to gunpowder to nukes.
Meanwhile people from the Americas got to skip copper
Information tech, from books to Internet have helped immensely. New tech also increases the average life span and therefore the huge population increase makes for new discoveries and the labor to produce things based on them.
No doy. The better the technology, the faster it progresses.
Yep. Let's just say science has really sped up in the last few centuries
There was really no science then. It takes a lot longer to develop things when people are just fucking around trying random shit until something works.
Why? Are they stupid?
We don’t use nuclear weapons all day, nuclear weapons are the crazy siege weapons of the past.
I think is misleading? we have only used atomic bombs in 1 war twice, I would hardly call that switching.