Maker FIERY FURNACE: The furnace, used to extract copper from ore and forge iron, was the biggest challenge in making the Stone Age telegraph. After many setbacks, a charcoal fire was hot enough to smelt copper, and a few days after that the author was able to make iron. (Left) A view into the furnace through the air intake, as the fire approaches 2,000º F. (Right) After the wooden chimney on the first smelting furnace went up in flames, the author built a chimney of river clay and flat stones.
furnace had no emissions control and consumed charcoal very inefficiently. This first trial probably never got above the temperature of a campfire. I had to give up on Session One of the project after picking through the remnants of this failed furnace and coming up with handfuls of ash. I was mired in the Paleolithic, nothing more than a caveman with big dreams. When I returned in the fall, I came armed with a dozen detailed articles from paid-access archives, about ancient furnaces in the Andes, Africa, and the Middle East. I started construction of a new, much smaller furnace with a chimney set into a hillside. Foolishly, I started with a wooden chimney. It went up in flames. I mortared a new chimney with river clay and flat stones, and set to work building bellows. The most effective one ended up looking like a classic European fireplace bellows. At most points in this process, however, a classic mental picture of a tool led me astray; making something that looked like an axe was a waste of time, when just the head of an axe in my hand did the job.
working telegraph possible in the Stone Age. Of course, this success is incomplete by itself. What good is a signal with no receiver? To go any further, I would need the cooperation of many other people, to build a wire network, and receivers, and to learn a code system. In fact, I had already relied heavily on cooperation to make my metal switch. In order to have six weeks of free time to do this project, I had all my needs taken care of by modern society. It may very well have proved impossible for a lone Paleolithic human to convince the people around her to participate in electronic communication. Even in the 1840s, Samuel Morse’s telegraph was mocked in Congress as a conjuring trick. DIY goes only so far, because there is no communication with only one person. Videos and more information about Immaculate Telegraphy can be found at immaculatetelegraphy. tumblr.com. This project was supported by the Eyebeam Honorary Residency and hosted at the Johnson Creek Ranch, with big thanks to Liz Filardi for
Metal Triumph Within a couple weeks of refining my technique, I was melting rocks and achieving the right temperatures, and soon I had tiny lumps of metal: first copper, and then wrought iron. Pounding these into disks and placing wedges of potato between them, I arrived at the simplest electric battery. In the end, I triumphed, and was able to assemble a switch producing Morse code at 0.7 volts — a 44
producing the video and web content.
Jamie O’Shea (substitutematerials.com) is an artist and inventor in New York City. His projects include automating memory, finding new ways to sleep, and bending the definition of time.
Make: Volume 23
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