People were mining, smelting, and forging many metals 650 years ago. The forge isn’t a complicated device. A coal fire with forced air to raise the temperature. Pressurized air can be taken from falling water. There are always bubbles. Leeskalnin’s PMH is really simple. If you have copper, silver or aluminum wire and Iron, you can make a permanent magnet. Moving copper, aluminum or silver through a magnetic field gives you electricity. Bees are not too hard to keep. Make a wood house with a small entrance for them and bait the inside with some beeswax and honeycomb and you can get them to move in. I worked at a fireworks factory a long time ago. Gunpowder is not hard to make. Finding potassium nitrate would be the hard part.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
yep, 3000bc+ going back to copper and bronze.
The_Caretaker@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
650 years ago steel was pretty common. Copper, silver and gold were used for coins and jewelry. Finding the supplies to make iron rods and copper wire wouldn’t bee the hardest part. The hard part would be making a battery. I should look up the Baghdad Battery again to see how it was made. I would probably also have to worry about being burned at the stake for practicing alchemy.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
common but still cottage industry forged. a fiefdom would break up tasks to smaller smiths to forge chain for mail, or steel billets for creating axe heads.
in small quantities and with considerable value, yes. you’re not going to wander up to some trader and say "gimme 300 furlongs of your shiny copper wire’ lol. and how would you buy it if you could? you have no specie, no tender beyond half knowing a bunch of kinda true science factoids.
for example, the baghdad battery is rather contested as to it’s actual purpose. Konig hypothesizes that it was a battery due to finding thin layers of gold he assumed were electroplated. Read the wikipedia article, these ideas aren’t really supported by a lot of the other evidence.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery