The smelter and the smith

 Here is a peek from a new assemblage, a large historical background to science. It is the stuff that did not fit in my Murdoch Book 100 Discoveries, or 100 große Sprünge: Die bedeutendsten Entdeckungen und Erfindungen der Menschheit, (Spektrum Akademischer Verlag).

The idea is to look at the enabling knowledge that opened up science for us.

There were seven metals known in ancient times: gold, mercury, tin, lead, silver, copper, and iron (on rare occasions, it was found as the metal in meteorites). Most of the time, people who wanted to get some metal had to treat an ore in some way, to smelt it to get the metal. Around the same time that coiled pots were showing up around Çatal Höyük, people began to smelt lead, copper and other metals from their ores. The copper might have been from deposits of copper metal (‘native copper’), but lead beads from the same area must have been smelted from lead ore.

A suitable ore had to be available, and then somebody needed to find or know a way to smelt the ore and use the metal. Zinc has probably been smelted in India for at least 2300 years, maybe 3000 years, but the first European zinc was only prepared in 1736 (possibly using technology learned from India, as the method was identical). In the Middle east, where copper ore was available from Cyprus, the early Bronze Age coincided with the start of writing and the development of city states, but bronze was probably in use even earlier, in what is now Thailand.

In some places, like sub-Saharan Africa, there was no Bronze Age at all. People jumped straight from the New Stone Age (Neolithic) direct to the Iron Age, probably because they had iron ore but no copper ore, though perhaps the iron technology was imported. Iron was probably being smelted and worked in the Middle East around 1100 BCE, and it appeared 600 years later in West Africa.

Tin could have been smelted by accident if the right rocks were used to make a fireplace. People say copper and lead might have been discovered the same way, but this is unlikely, because copper smelting needs 1100°C and carbon monoxide to reduce the oxide to metal.

Lead could form by accident if a piece of the ore became buried in the ashes with limited oxygen, but both copper and lead were more likely to form in a potter’s kiln. One attractive theory is that potters began decorating their pots with minerals to add colour, noticed the metals that formed on the pots, and began experimenting.

Charcoal is dry and has 10% of the mass of the wood it came from, so charcoal fires burn hotter, if they have enough (but not too much) oxygen. With good charcoal and the right amount of air, a temperature of 1500°C is possible if the fire is surrounded to keep the heat in. An open fireplace with coals is unlikely to get higher than 600°C, even when a high wind blows through it, because the same high wind that promotes burning also carries away much of the heat. In other words, making metal needed the heat of a kiln or an oven, not the heat of an open fire. It was an art, not luck.

Copper is a soft metal, good enough to make maces but not blades, so Çatal Höyük is generally referred to as a chalcolithic site, a place where copper and stone were both used. Somewhere, somehow, somebody learned to make bronze, an alloy of copper with arsenic or tin. The earliest examples of copper/arsenic bronze come from Asia Minor in about 4200 BCE, while the harder copper/tin bronze was used from about 3200 BCE.

We can come up with plausible yarns to account for people making copper metal, but iron remains a bit of a mystery. It has a strong attraction to oxygen, which is why iron rusts so easily, and why iron oxide is a common iron ore. At around 900°C, the oxygen is more strongly attracted to carbon, so if iron oxide is collected from a bog or some other place, it can be converted to the metal. It takes a great deal more heat to melt iron, but the metal that forms at 900°C can be hammered and worked in a bloomery, and shaped into tools.

Smelting and refining did not always bring blessings. Cores taken from lake beds in the Andes reveal that Peruvians were smelting copper 1000 years ago, but around the year 1450, they switched to silver, which leaves a different pattern of pollution. They probably began smelting more silver because the Incas demanded that taxes be paid in silver. When the conquistadors took over in 1533, the silver-smelting pollution increased tenfold.

The ice of Greenland shows clear traces of pollution from copper production, dating back to about 500 BCE. This probably came mainly from the production of copper and bronze around the Mediterranean, even as they entered the Iron Age. The real advantage of iron was that it was cheap and easy to make iron weapons in large numbers. Even if gentlemen preferred bronze, a thousand poorly-trained peasants with shoddy iron stabbers can overwhelm 300 trained warriors with superb bronze swords.

In the end, a smith needed to shape and toughen the metal.

Shipping may also have been a factor. Ships would certainly have been up to carrying Cypriot copper ore or metal by 2000 BCE, possibly much earlier, but it is tempting to wonder if tin or tin ore was being carried to the Mediterranean from Cornwall by then: tin was certainly being mined and worked in Cornwall in about 2150 BCE. All around, the general picture of early metal working is clear, but many of the finds leave us still wondering. From Weland to Ogoun to Cullann to mpu Gandring, in many cultures (look them up!), the smith is seen as having the powers of a magician—and no wonder...

A history of climate change.

Jens Galschiot's installation, Unbearable, in Copenhagen

In the savage illustration on the right, the J-curve that is skewering the polar bear reflects the graph of the unstoppable rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the curve is made from lengths of oil pipe. Sometimes, art and politics go together very well. 

We have known about what we used to call ‘global warming’ for quite a while, since the 1950s, though it was predicted (as a theory) in the 1820s and explained in the 1850s. Now reputable atmospheric scientists all believe human activity is driving the modern warming of our climate. All the same, they agree that global warming is a bad description, so we call it ‘climate change’. Under any name, it’s the same beast, and the same looming disaster. The problem used to be that there was not a lot of hard science in the arguments, which come down to logic, reason, careful modelling—and interpretation that is likely to be biased by a generous serving of self-interest among the nay-sayers.

In 1856 at the AAAS Annual Meeting, the work of Eunice Foote was presented, showing that carbon dioxide is a heat-blanketing greenhouse gas that in the atmosphere could warm the Earth. This was years before the work of the men usually credited with the finding (Tyndall in England and Arrhenius in Sweden, and we will come to them in a bit). Her work was in a short piece in The American Journal of Science and Arts for 1856 begins on p. 382, and says: “An atmosphere of that gas [carbonic acid, CO2] would give our earth a high temperature …”

Even before that, in the 1820s, Joseph Fourier had realised that heat-trapping by what we now call greenhouse gases might occur. Then in 1856, Foote identified carbon dioxide as the most likely threat, before John Tyndall said much the same thing in 1861. Back then, nobody thought much about it, then Svante Arrhenius reminded us in 1896 that both water vapour and carbon dioxide were ‘greenhouse gases’ (escaping that bad analogy is hard) and so water and carbon dioxide would play a role in making the planet get warmer.

He also considered that changes might be happening, and consulted Arvid Högbom, who just happened to know all about carbon dioxide sources and sinks. Carbon dioxide was coming from animals when they breathed, from volcanoes, and from humans burning fossil and other fuels. Arrhenius thought the human additions were a very small part of the total in the air already, perhaps one part in a thousand was added by the burning of coal, and there were probably checks and balances. Arrhenius estimated that in 3000 years, the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide would double, but that such a doubling would raise world average temperatures by 5 to 6°C.

In 1896, the CO₂ level was around 290 parts per million: in 2016, the value was estimated at 396 parts per million: we had travelled one third of the distance in 120 years. In 2018, it was 407.4 ppm, and in May 2023, it reached a seasonal peak of 424 ppm. My back-of-the-envelope scribblings suggest we will double the 1896 value by the 2070s, after about 180 years, rather than 3000 years.

To Europeans back then, the warming effect seemed nothing to worry about, because nobody had stopped to consider the cascades, the flow-ons that might be driven by that rise in temperature. A thermodynamics expert, Walter Nernst, even wondered if it would be feasible to set fire to uneconomical and low-grade coal seams, so as to release enough carbon dioxide to warm the Earth’s climate deliberately!

In December 2019, Australia recorded its six hottest days ever, and 2023 now looks to be set to be the hottest ever, around the globe, but the trend was apparent even in 1950, when George Kimble reported in Scientific American that the northern limit of wheat-growing in Canada had moved northward some 200 or 300 miles (call it 400 kilometres), adding that farmers in southern Ontario were experimenting with growing cotton. While the Canadian cotton industry seems not to have taken off yet, he reported another trend that continues to this day, the northward retreat of the permafrost:

In parts of Siberia the southern boundary of permanently frozen ground is receding poleward several dozen yards per annum.

The matter open to question back in 1950 was the cause. Kimble noted that the Domesday Book listed 38 vineyards in England in 1086, in addition to those of the Crown. He pointed to the Greenland colony which was frozen out, back around the mid-1400s and other evidence that climates change. He looked also at Biblical evidence on the distribution of date palms to suggest that conditions in 1950 were much like those of Biblical times, providing a picture of a climate that fluctuates around a mean. Nothing to see here…

In the 1990s, global warming was in much the same position that “continental drift” had been in, a generation earlier, with some of the scientists arguing furiously, even when they agreed on the main principles, and as in the puzzle of the wandering continents, the key evidence was all there. The problem is that once again we were stuck with a bad analogy, just as the early 1960s saw us hung up on “continental drift”.

Mind you, when I covered the 2002 Spring Conference of the American Geophysical Union, there were no nay-sayers there on plate tectonics or climate change. The problem is that so long as people can get away with saying “global warming”, we are once again stuck with a bad label, just as the early 1960s saw us hung up on “continental drift”.

Scientists are always slow to move to a new model, a new way of understanding, something called a paradigm, and I lived through the plate tectonics paradigm shift, and saw some of the brawling. There was fuss and bother along the way, but in the end, the good science was recognised and accepted.

Now about the ‘greenhouse effect’: in cold climates, a greenhouse is a glass shed which allows sunlight to shine in, where much of the energy is absorbed and changed to heat. Glass is less transparent to heat than it is to light, but a greenhouse does not just trap warmth that way: it also holds a body of warm air around the plants, and protects them from wind-driven evaporation. So while we still speak of ‘greenhouse gases’, it is rare to hear anybody mention the greenhouse effect these days.

In the last ten years we have seen how the climate spin-doctors were using the same crooked tactics that were used to hide the harm that tobacco does. Nowadays, nobody denies that the Earth is getting warmer, because the evidence is there, but we stay with the less-easy-to-lie about climate change.

Why? Mainly, the cost of disagreement and bickering is higher in this fight. It mattered not at all if people disagreed about plate tectonics (except, perhaps, that it makes tsunamis like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami easier to understand), but global warming will be a major disaster for humanity, and any delay has the potential to cost lives. To understand this, we have to accept some puzzling propositions.

To take one example, the formation of cold salty water in the Norwegian Sea is probably what stops Dublin and New York being iced-in each winter. This is because of the cold brine that drives a current known as the Conveyor, which in turn drives the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream takes warm water from the Caribbean and swirls it up around the North Atlantic, contributing to fogs and breaking icebergs loose, but keeping many ports warm and open, even in winter.

Just as the prion proteins of mad cow disease have more than one stable form, so do weather patterns, and if the weather once drops into a new pattern, we may not be able to bounce it back to where it started. A golf ball in a wok lies at the bottom, and if you move it and let it go, it will roll back down. That is a stable system. A golf ball, sitting on a long cardboard tube doesn’t fall, so we might say it is stable, but if you knocked it over, it wouldn’t come back to this position. We say it is metastable.

The golf ball on the tube is stable to small nudges, but only within limits. Humpty Dumpty had two positions, one on the wall and one off it, and according to the nursery rhyme, the second was a position of no return. On the wall, Humpty Dumpty was metastable, but beside the wall, he was stable, and broken.

Climate patterns are either stable or metastable. If they are pushed too hard, they may ‘flip’ into a new metastable pattern (or even break), and only then, too late, do we discover that they were metastable (or even breakable). The best example of a probably metastable pattern is the monsoon system that waters much of Asia and the north of Australia, but El Niño and Indian Ocean Dipole are other possibles.

Climate scientists worry that severe changes may deliver a push that will take a metastable pattern away from what we know, and there might be no way of returning to the original pattern. The good news is that as northern Europe freezes over, the glaciers which are now melting away fast will be replenished, lowering sea levels. The increased snow cover will also increase the reflectivity of the northern hemisphere, and that may cool the planet down a little. We just have to hope it does not trigger a new stable pattern that happens to be an ice age.

The actual changes that might follow any breaking point are hard to predict. They are unlikely to be spectacular and major, and probably they will do their harm stealthily, when roads, bridges, port facilities and cities are flooded, or when agricultural land is lost, either by being covered by the sea or as a result of drastically changed rainfall patterns.

If rock is exposed in Antarctica, this could lead to a low pressure zone over the icy continent that could change weather patterns around the world. It hasn’t happened yet, but we need to learn from history. Ten years ago, no politician would take a long-term view and force the changes needed in the next thirty to forty years, when most of them are elected for a mere three to four years, before they face the voters again.

It is easier to bleat plaintively that there is no real agreement among the scientists yet (there is, actually), or that some eminent scientists (they aren’t eminent: just look at where their funding comes from) believe there are other explanations. That saves the politicians from having to act—and the honesty of scientists in saying that they cannot be sure just how things will go wrong allows devious short-term opportunists to prattle that “the scientists aren’t sure…”.

Politics is a marvellous human discovery. It is a pity that politicians still have to discover humanity and consider its prospects. It is likely that politics, dithering, duck-shoving and shilly-shallying will make this disaster happen, and many of the effects will seem to be unrelated to the climate.

Take dengue (pronounced den-GAY) fever, which is caused by the dengue fever virus, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The geographic range of Aedes aegypti is limited by freezing temperatures that kill overwintering larvae and eggs, so dengue virus transmission is limited to tropical and subtropical regions.

Aedes albopictus is also capable of spreading dengue fever. As a rule, the Aedes mosquitoes are recognizable by their striped legs (which give Aedes albopictus its nickname of ‘tiger mosquito’), and the fact that they bite by day.

Dengue fever involves an internal haemorrhage that sometimes leads to shock—a drop in blood pressure and failure of blood cells to meet the metabolic demands of the body. It is a leading cause of death among children in Southeast Asia, killing about 1% of all cases. It includes four distinct viruses or serotypes, dengue 1 through dengue 4. As in the case of malaria, mosquitoes become infected with dengue after taking a blood meal from a dengue-infected person.

People infected with dengue virus develop dengue fever or dengue haemorrhagic fever. Dengue fever is also known as ‘breakbone disease’ because of severe headache and joint pain associated with it. Dengue haemorrhagic fever is far more serious than the rarely fatal dengue fever.

After a short incubation period of 1 or 2 weeks, the mosquito can transmit the infection to a susceptible person. An infection with any of the four serotypes confers protective lifelong immunity, but only to that serotype. The risk of developing haemorrhagic dengue appears to be increased among people later infected with a different serotype. In recent years, haemorrhagic dengue has become increasingly common in tropical America.

Climate change is expected not only to increase the range of the mosquito but would also reduce the size of the mosquito’s larval size and, ultimately, its adult size. Since smaller adults must feed more frequently to develop their eggs, warmer temperatures would boost the frequency of double feeding and increase the chance of transmission, which will happen when the first person bitten is carrying the virus.

Warmer temperatures reduce the incubation time for the virus. The incubation period of the dengue type-2 virus is 12 days at 30°C, but seven days at 32 to 35°C. Half the world’s population is currently at risk from the disease, and it has recently become a serious problem in Latin America. Brazil alone had a quarter of a million cases in 1997.

Dengue is hard to eradicate once it is established. In Australia, it reappeared in north Queensland in 1981 after being absent for some 25 years, and it spreads each year through the areas of northern Australia where the Aedes aegypti mosquito is found, though cases are reported from across Australia each year, as a result of people being infected in either the north of the continent or overseas.

There have been suggestions in the past that global warming could lead to a spread of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and thus the disease, but at the moment, Australian cases seem to be limited to about 200 a year. There is, however, a massive increase in cases across the whole of the western Pacific. Our turn will come…

Haycock goes bankrupt

This is a second out-take that didn't fit my upcoming Australia: a Social History.  The work began with The Big Book of Australian History, which went through four editions under the National Library of Australia's imprint. but as they have lost the plot, I am going my own way.

This version is 2.5 times the size of the original version. Soon, I will be seeking a publisher...

* * *

The man identified by Henry Brown as W. W. Haycock, appears to have usually used the name George Washington Haycock. Brown later called Haycock one of those who had been convicted of no crime, but who, nonetheless, “have found themselves in scrapes which have compelled them to leave their own country”. As we will see later, that was not his real name, but “Haycock” began to take a prominent position in local affairs around Bendigo (or Sandhurst, as it was then called) in 1856. He was a trader, and one of the town’s principal merchants. Nothing could be done, Brown said, unless Haycock agreed to it. The American was admired, and he helped many less successful traders, but Brown took an instinctive dislike to him. Brown thought the praise given to Haycock seemed unwarranted, but still the man did well.

Then, one day, Brown found he had been right to trust his instincts:

…we were astonished one day by receiving the following communication by express,—

“Confidential. Melbourne.” “Haycock, we believe, has bolted; we inclose a draft of Two Hundred and Fifty Pounds, payable at his office in Sandhurst, which he gave us a week since, obtain the money if possible, remit to Melbourne, and keep this communication a secret, for we may be mistaken.”
— Henry Brown, Victoria As I Found It, 228 – 9.

The message came from a good friend, so Brown went seeking the money, only to be told Haycock was in Melbourne, there was no money on hand, and that Haycock would return in two or three days.

Brown pushed them, saying the order was made payable on demand, and in the end, Haycock’s credit being so good, his clerk went out and borrowed the money from other firms. A week later, the news was all over Bendigo, and people who had been caught out feared going bankrupt. When Brown told his friends he had no dealings with Haycock, they reminded him that other firms would also “go smash”, but Brown had settled up accounts with all the at-risk houses during the previous week.

One American store and hotel-keeper had made a great deal of money, but having injured himself, placed all of his savings in Haycock’s hands, on the promise that the men would meet in Melbourne, where Haycock would pay over the cash. Then he headed for Melbourne to take a ship home to retirement, but the money never came. He missed his ship, and feared that Haycock and his money were on board. Then another American told the truth about Haycock, and the man realised he had lost everything.

The truth-teller knew Haycock was an assumed name, because the two had grown up in the same small town. He was liked, did well, and when a fire almost ruined him, his friends helped him get going again. Then, one day, Haycock bolted, running off with a large amount of money, and people began wondering if his fire had been suspicious.

He went to the American “Slave States” where he married a lovely girl, the daughter of a planter, but three days later, he deserted her and went to California. His brother-in-law caught up with him there and abused him for deserting his wife, at which point they agreed to duel. Haycock’s first shot pierced his brother-in-law’s heart. People were furious, so he cleared out again, and the narrator came across him, working a neighbouring claim near Bendigo. When he addressed Haycock by his real name, the man asked him to keep his secret and use only his new name.

“Haycock” said he was a reformed character. The narrator saw no use in “outing” him, when he was so poor. Soon after, though, he put up a small tent and began buying old tools, such as broken picks, damaged cradles. He would mend these and sell them, did well, and soon Haycock was well-known as an agent, cattle dealer, and general merchant.

All this time I watched his conduct narrowly, and could see nothing amiss, besides he was a sad man, and in the midst of his success, it seemed to me, that his former crimes weighed heavily upon him; for many of you will remember how rare was his smile, and a laugh proceeding from those lips, I think, you have none of you ever heard.
— Henry Brown, Victoria As I Found It, 234.

Brown said everybody just assumed that Haycock had run off with all the money, but after he was found drowned, it emerged that he had got a barber to shave off his long beard, and pawned a pistol. He must have wandered the countryside, hungry and fearing his creditors, people said.

Later, some gentlemen of Bendigo and elsewhere were summoned to Geelong to confirm that the exhumed corpse of a drowned man was Haycock. The statement below, taken from the pages of The Argus, has been abbreviated by the deletion of some irrelevant legal formalities.

We, Thomas Kirk Newton, of Melbourne, gentleman; Thomas Disher, of the same place, gentleman; James Boone, of Sandhurst, doctor of medicine; Decimus Prothero, of Bathurst, New South Wales, gentleman; Sumner Cummings Fraser, of Sandhurst, drover; and Robert Hadin Smith, of Melbourne, articled clerk, severally and respectively do solemnly and sincerely declare that we have this day exhumed and carefully examined the body said to be that of the late George Washington Haycock, late of Sandhurst aforesaid, and that the said body is that of the said George Washington Haycock, beyond doubt or dispute…

(Signed) Thos. Kirk Newton, Thomas Disher, James Boone M.D., Decimus Prothero, Sumner Cummings Fraser, Robert H. Smith. Declared at Geelong, in the colony of Victoria, this 30th day of September, A.D. 1856, before me (signed) Charles Ibbotson, J.P.
— The Argus, 1 October 1856, 5.

Some people had their doubts about the identification, and at least one of them said so, rather forcefully, in this curious letter, signed ‘Vox’. According to ‘Vox’, the report signed by Newton, Disher, Boone, Prothero, Fraser, and R. H. Smith was not only puerile, but childish, not creditable to those gentlemen. The writer was not prepared to accept their identification.

Let six men of only common sense examine the disputed body, take the height and weight, a plaster cast of the face, a few photographic likenesses, some of the hair, and general and particular description of his body; give this to the public, and they will determine for themselves. If this is not enough, seal up the body in a zinc shell, and forward it to Bendigo, where I am disposed to believe there will be found some Bendigonians who can determine the question.
— Bendigo Advertiser, 15 October 1856, 2.

Without some effort, “the majority here will continue to believe that the body in question is not that of G. W. Haycock.” One of those pilloried, Decimus Prothero, was a wealthy grazier from Bathurst, and he had “had dealings” with Haycock. One of these dealings was a mob of 12,000 cattle that crossed the Murray into Victoria in late August 1856, about the time Haycock ran off. In all probability, Prothero had lost money in those dealings.

Prothero did not appreciate the tone of the letter, and having identified ‘Vox’, he took the law into his own hands. Before we look at the ensuing court case, here is a fact that the Bendigo Advertiser added when they reprinted the letter: one of the six gentlemen in the statement was Haycock’s “medical attendant” (in other words, Dr Boone), and he recognised the body by certain scars that it bore.

So Prothero was right to be annoyed, though he may have been just a little robust in his actions, but ‘Vox’, alias Hutchison was hardly a model of rectitude in making his comments! In the following report from the Mount Alexander Mail, one reference may need explanation: “Professor Sands” was a well-known hairdresser and barber. Prothero appeared before Messrs. M’Lachlan, Hunt, and Emmett, at the police office, Sandhurst, to answer a charge of having, the day before, assaulted Dr. Hutchison. He entered a plea of guilty. Hutchison said he was standing on the previous afternoon outside the Shamrock Hotel, when the defendant came up and asked if his name was Acheson, and he said it was not. The defendant went away, then returned to ask if his name was Hutchison. He confirmed this, at which point Prothero pointed to a folded newspaper that he held. Was he the author of a letter in that paper? At this point, we switch to the published account.

Complainant said that if his name was attached to any letter in any paper he certainly was the author of it, but if his name was not appended to it, he should decline to answer any question put by a mere stranger in the public streets. Defendant then seized complainant by the beard and plucked it out, and one of the bystanders then interfered and took the defendant away…

The defendant here explained that he had acted upon strong provocation. He had been in company with some other gentlemen, to Geelong, for the purpose of identifying the body of G. W. Haycock, and had done so, and having stated that he considered the body to be absolutely and truly that of Mr. Haycock, a letter had appeared in the Bendigo Advertiser calling his word into question, and this letter he had ascertained was written by the complainant. He did not deny the assault: he certainly had pulled the Doctor’s beard out, and now begged to return it to him.

(Defendant here drew from his pocket the complainant’s beard, wrapped in paper, and suggested that Professor Sands would stick it on again for eightpence.)

The bench found that a most unwarrantable assault had been committed, that free speech ought to be allowed without risk, and Mr Prothero was to recollect he was not in California. The defendant was to be fined £10, or in default of payment ten days’ imprisonment. The fine was immediately paid. Haycock’s disappearance may well have cost Prothero dearly, because Prothero himself disappeared from the Australian scene rather oddly, the following year, after this announcement in the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal:

Sir, I write to request you to be good enough to insert in your next publication the fact that I, finding my affairs in a state of hopeless entanglement, have gone to England for the purpose of seeing my friends, who are rich and respectable, and who will, I believe, do anything to avert dishonour from the family. My absence will, I hope, be no more than seven months.

“Your obedient servant, DECIMUS PROTHERO.
— Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 7 October 1857, 3.

He seems to have stayed in Britain.