Civilization, Ancient and Wicked
In the first book of The Histories of Herodotus, the Oracle at Delphi poses this riddle to the Spartans who are seeking victory over the men of Tegea:
'In Arcady lies Tegea in the level plain, where under strong constraint two winds are blowing; smiting is there and counter-smiting, and woe on woe; There earth, the giver of life, holds Agamemnons son. Bring him home, and you will prevail over Tegea.'
Lichas, a Spartan agent, '… went to Tegea and entered a forge where he watched some iron being hammered out, a process which caused him great surprise. The smith, seeing his astonishment, paused in his work and said: 'Well, my friend, your surprise at seeing me work in iron would be nothing to what you'd felt, if you had seen what I saw. I wanted to make a well in the yard here, and as I was digging I came upon a huge coffin- ten feet long!'...[]
Lichas came to the conclusion that the oracle was fulfilled... He found the explaination of the 'winds' in the smith's two pairs of bellows; the 'smiting and counter-smiting' were the hammer and anvil, and the 'woe on woe' the beaten iron- the inference being drawn from the fact that the discovery of iron was a bad thing for mankind.
Whoa, holy shit. Hold the phone, kids. Orestes was the son of Agamemnon, and Agamemnon was the war-leader in Homer’s Iliad. According to this account, Orestes was a giant. Which would mean that Agamemnon was also a giant. Which would mean that a race of giants constituted the ruling house of ancient Mycenae.
It is in the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal biblical text, that we learn of a race of giants, the hybrid offspring of Fallen Angels and mortal man. The Book of Enoch also tells us that the forbidden art of metallurgy was taught to men by those same Fallen Angels.
Say it again:
‘The Discovery of Iron Was a Bad Thing for Mankind’
Proper documentation of the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) begins after its climax. It’s like trying to guess what the explosion looked like by judging the maimed bodies that it left. The photographic era does not begin until the tail end of it, when the frenchman Nicephore Niepce develops the first known photograph in 1822. Charles Dickens, famous author, social critic, and inventor of Christmas, isn’t born until 1817. His productive years coincide with the reign of Queen Victoria the 1st and the eponymous Victorian Era (1837-1901). The pollution and squalor of Victorian London is the stuff of legend, due in no small part to the efforts of Charles Dickens.
The man was highly critical of the whole thing. He places the blame for the plight of England in general, and London in particular, squarely at the feet of wealthy industrialists and the government that enabled them. He returns to the theme of urban poverty and capitalism’s exploitation of the working poor so often that modern commentators have called him a socialist. Maybe he was just a human being with a strong heart and a weak stomach. Lets review:
Ye Good Olde Days
NO CHILD LABOR LAWS: By 1830, children made up 50% of the english work force. Low wages forced women to sell their children to factory owners, who also purchased orphans from the state. Children from the ages of four to fourteen worked 12 to 19 hour days, performing dangerous tasks for as little as one eighth of the wage of their adult counterparts. In the course of their work, children were sometimes scalped, maimed, or crushed to death by moving machine parts. In the coal fields, children as young as five were stripped, chained to their coal carts, and sent down into the earth to retrieve black gold from the most narrow veins. Less than half of the children born in Victoria’s England lived past the age of fifteen. -source
PHOSSY JAW: ‘phossy jaw’ was an affliction unique to workers in match factories. ‘Lucifers’ were the worlds first strike-anywhere match. They worked much better than the ones we have today, but came at a steep human cost. First documented in 1838, phossy jaw is a necrotic condition wherein the teeth and jaws disintegrate. It is caused by overexposure to white phosphorous, which was used to produce the ‘strike-anywhere’ component of the Lucifer match-head. Phosphorous necrosis is always fatal if the afflicted jaw is not removed. The lucifer match was so popular that the British government, at the behest of the companies it represented, did not even acknowledge that white phosphorous was dangerous until 1898, when so many cases of phossy jaw had accumulated that they could no longer pretend like it wasn’t a problem. In 1901, match-makers Bryant & May began using the newly discovered, non-poisonous phosphorous sesquisulphide in their lucifers. It would still be nine more years before the British government would move to ban the use of white phosphorous. -source
'All of this shit sounds so ridiculous and made up. What the fuck?'
WELCOME TO THE MACHINE
Henry Mayhew, who studied the London poor in 1823 quotes “there is barely sufficient work for the regular employment of half of our laborers, so that only 1,500,000 are fully and constantly employed, while 1,500,000 more are employed only half their time, and the remaining 1,500,000 wholly unemployed” (Thompson 250) -source
These people did not give a shit. They could afford not to. For every match dipper who’s jaw melted, for every orphan chewed up by the cotton wheel, there was another one out on the streets desperate enough to take their place. How this situation came about deserves careful study, but all of that is outside the scope of this piece. My overarching point is this:
It was ready access to affordable, high-quality iron that did all of this. The math is so simple even a Barbarian could do it.
The First Industrial Revolution saw craftsmen turned to machine operators, and people turned into machine parts. The mechanization of labor gave rise to rampant urbanization, and the cheap and efficient production of luxury goods gave rise to a robust global trade network. Globalization and the rise of modern capitalism cannot be separated from the advent of factory labor and tenements; they are two heads of the same awful chimera. London, England was the epicenter of the First Industrial Revolution; London remains a hub of global capitalism and of the world financial system. The mechanization of an entire planet is beautiful in its own way, but the Barbarian in me hates it. People are no longer free to live at their own pace, to live and die on their own terms. Maybe they never were. The Barbarian meme will endure for as long as people crave the freedom, even if such freedom is only to be found in an age undreamed of.
The Tin Islands= The Iron Islands
The mining tradition on the British Isles is ancient. Herodotus writes about the Tin Islands (Cassitrides) in the mid-5th century BC:
Of that part of Europe nearest to the west, I am not able to speak with decision. I by no means believe that the barbarians give the name of Eridanus to a river which empties itself into the Northern Sea; whence, it is said, our amber comes. Neither am I better acquainted with the islands called the Cassiterides, from which we are said to have our tin.
He can neither confirm nor deny their existence. This writer is sure that the site of modern Cornwall in England had a monopoly on tin exports in the age of Herodotus. This is significant; bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. No tin, no bronze. No bronze, no Bronze Age. The Tin (British) Islands were a bed of bloody contest during much of ancient history; perhaps what everyone was really fighting over were mineral rights.
The Tin Islands are also rich in coal and iron. Because the production of iron would come to depend on coal in the coming centuries, It is interesting to note that most of the iron deposits on the British isles are on or near coal fields. It’s like some agency in the universe had planned for all this.
It was the perfect set-up: The intellectual capital of 19th century Europe + the investment capital of the british mercantile empire + iron and coal you dont have to trade for + an overflowing labor pool you barely have to pay for= profit
By the late 1600’s, industrial activity had already denuded much of England of its forests. Early blast furnaces ran on charcoal, but the iron smelters of England were running out of trees to burn. During this period, much of England’s iron had to be imported.
English smelters began exploring coal as an alternative to charcoal. The trouble with using coal in the blast furnace is that the sulphur in it makes the iron brittle.
Abraham Darby had been using mixtures of coke and charcoal in different ratios to smelt iron-ore for several years before discovering in 1709 that using 100% coke significantly improved the quality and quantity of the smelted iron. With Abraham Darby’s discovery, English coal would smash the availability of English iron wide open; and both industries would thrive on a stack of human bodies.
Coke is coal that has been heat-treated to drive off all of the volatile substances. The resultant product is lightweight and porous, allowing for greater air flow through the furnace. It is also tougher than coal, allowing for more raw material to be packed into the furnace column. A coke-fired blast furnace could reach internal temperatures of up to 3000 degrees fahrenheit, producing higher yields of quality iron in a shorter amount of time. With the new-found ease of manufacture the cost of local iron plummeted, and the First Industrial Revolution could proceed in earnest.
The coke-fires that cooked the coal, the coke that fed the blast furnaces, the coal that was burned to power steam engines, the steam that powered the machines, this was the blood of the First Industrial Revolution. It’s bones were made from British iron, and it’s tendons and ligaments were made from the living bodies of people that no one cared about.
Proceed to The Second Industrial Revolution?
Or would you like more Conan?
The Bessemer Process
Today we take steel for granted. It is everywhere, in everything. Two hundred years ago, it may as well have been a precious metal.
At its most basic, steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. It’s properties of strength and durability are much improved over those of elemental iron; indeed, unalloyed iron is softer than bronze. Those who possessed steel technology in the ancient world were at a distinct technological advantage over those who only had access to bronze; the shift from an industrial culture based on wrought iron to one based on steel is a quantum leap similar to the jump from bronze to iron, and it is precisely this shift which the Bessemer process facilitated.
Before Bessemer’s conversion process, steel-makers would layer bars of wrought iron (iron alloyed with a small amount of carbon) with powdered charcoal and heat the mixture over long periods to increase the carbon content of the alloy. This process is called cementation, and can take anywhere from days to weeks. The conversion of iron to steel was difficult which is why, before 1860, large metallic structures were made almost exclusively from wrought iron. In 1857, Bessemer’s Converter changed everything. Suddenly, large quantities of steel could be churned out at rapid pace and with minimal expense. Within twenty years, steel would lose its prestige status and became a staple industrial product.
Carnegie Steel
Andrew Carnegie was born to a handloom weaver in a one-room house in Dunfermline, Scottland at a time when cloth-weaving was gradually, and then suddenly, monopolized by factory production.
In the 1840’s, the newly-impoverished Carnegies crossed the Atlantic Ocean to seek their living in the Land of Opportunity and landed in Alleghany, Pennsylvania.
Andrew Carnegie would become the first person to deploy the Bessemer process on a large scale, flooding the world market with large quantities of cheaply manufactured, high-quality steel. The first of Carnegie’s steel mills, The Edgar Thomson Steel-works, was inaugerated on August 22, 1875. Thus, a Scottish immigrant pivoted the epicenter of World Industrial Progress from London, England to Braddock Township near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914), also called the Technological Revolution, was the immediate result of many factors acting in concert, but people love the Great Man narrative. It is to American steel in general, and to the activities of Andrew Carnegie in particular, that the groundwork of the Second Industrial Revolution is commonly attributed. Why? Because steel, that’s why.
Here he is, folks: Mr. Bootstraps himself, the archetype of the self-made American billionaire and philanthropist, a paragon before whom later generations could only embarrass themselves. Never mind that hostile take-overs of weaker businesses, deliberately suppressed wages, and busting up disenfranchised workers on strike with the combined might of the Pinkerton private police and the National Guard were all a part of his success formula.
The god-like steel magnate in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was based on this man and his exploits. And why not? In 1860, before Carnegie Steel, America had produced only 13,000 tons of steel. After Carnegie, in 1880, 1,467,000 tons. By 1900, 11,227,000 tons; this was more than England and Germany combined, at a time when a countries might could be measured by it’s steel output.This trend continues: at the dawn of World War I in 1914, America produced 23,500,000 tons of steel; by the end of the war in 1918, this number had again doubled. American domination of the world steel market would form the backbone of close to a century of American economic and military dominance.
Foundries were high-priority military targets. In the aftermath of World War I, the infrastructure of much of Europe had been razed to the earth, ensuring another few decades of unchecked American monopolization of the global steel market. By the end of the Second World War, the industrial capabilities of much of the European continent had once again been reduced to nothing. American steel accounted for over half the worlds supply in the post-war years not only because American industrial activity was so vigorous, but also because competing steel industries had been utterly destroyed twice in less than fifty years. American steel would ride its priviledged position well into the Cold War years, when the state-of-the-art steel industries gifted to Japan and Germany during post-war reconstruction efforts by the Americans would come back to bite them.
Prelude To War
It was steel which made the first World War possible.
When the first transcontinental railroad built in the United States was completed in 1869, Carnegie knew the floodgates had been opened. Railroads would soon criss-cross the nation in every direction, and iron would be needed to build them. He would have had an excellent investment opportunity on his hands with or without the Bessemer converter; by 1872 the American railroad’s demand for iron had outstripped domestic production. But Carnegie had seen the Bessemer converter demonstrated on a recent trip to Europe, and must have known that Bessemer steel had been used in the worlds first all-steel railroad track at Derby Railway Station in 1857. Remember: Carnegie began his ascent apprenticing for a railroad magnate. The steel rails proved more durable than the iron ones they had replaced, and Carnegie, like all good investors, was endowed with the gift of foresight.
The Bessemer steel that Carnegie’s Edgar-Thompson mill produced was not suitable for structural beams or other large-scale engineering projects; exposure to an excess of nitrogen made Bessemer steel more brittle than its succesors. The advent of the open-hearth process by Carl Wilhelm Seimens, which was first deployed at scale by frenchman Pierre-Emile Martin in 1865, would solve this problem. But Bessemer conversion was faster, cheaper, and the steel it produced was perfect for rolling into steel rails.
The impact of steel rails on the transport sector should not be understated; they were more resistant to corrosion, and could handle heavier loads and faster engines. It may not seem like much on paper, but they changed everything.
By 1900, 93% of American railroad tracks had been converted to steel. With entire continents newly united end to end by inexpensive and efficient locomotion, the resources and manpower of whole nations could be rapidly mobilized war.
It is notable that Bessemer’s converter was developed in Europe, under the patronage of European aristocratic and military interests. Bessemer’s solution to the riddle of steel production evolved out of a military problem; he had been researching gun metals, in quest of a formula which could handle the firing of stronger charges and larger projectiles.
Steel machine parts were more durable than their iron cohorts, and the ready availability of inexpensive, mid-to-high-grade steel delivered by transcontinental railroad helped to drive rapid advancements in every field of engineering, science, technology, and manufacturing.
Stainless steel was officially developed in 1912 by Harry Brearly, another English metallurgist seeking to improve gun barrels by developing a workable metal that could resist corrosion and heat distortion. Stainless steel is an alloy of steel blended with a minimum of 10.5% chromium. Overcoming every weakness of steel while retaining all of its strengths, this material would prove as significant to the development of industrial society as the discovery of steel itself. This new form of steel did not make it into the gun barrels of the first World War (1914-1918), but it was immediately put to use in the airplane engines, tanks, ships and medical equipment that would populate the battlefields and sea-lanes of war-torn Europe.
Airplanes and submarines were almost entirely new inventions at the dawn of 1914. The first German submersible craft had sunk to the bottom of Kiel harbor during a test-drive in 1850. The Wright brothers had demonstrated sustained, controlled flight with their compact flying machine on December 17, 1903, only eleven years before the war’s outbreak. The first tanks were developed only after the conflict had reached a fever pitch, in response to the shock conditions of trench warfare.
Many of the chemical mechanisms we take for granted today, and the byproducts of their exploitation, had yet to be fully elucidated. Chemical engineering at every scale had been aided tremendously by the recent leaps forward in steel manufacturing; for example, the compressed gas cylinder was only developed as late as 1880. On the whole, chemical engineering was still a highly experimental field. International chemical cartels appear to have used the experimental nature of the first World War to conduct chemical experiments on living human subjects.
Household bleach was developed as a chemical weapon during WWI, but it wasn’t a very good one. Phosgene, mustard gas, adamsite, chloropicrin, diphenylchlorarsine; these were the stars of the choking death which would sweep over the battlefields of Europe.
In short; people had no idea what they were in for.
Dehumanized
At the Paris Exhibition of 1881, the inventor Hiram Maxim was allegedly given this advice:
'If you want to make a fortune, you should invent a machine that would help these europeans kill each other.'
The arms race between the competing European colonial powers had been escalating for years. Hiram Maxim seized upon an investment opportunity and created the Maxim Gun, a successor to the Gattling Gun. You may remember the Gattling Gun from the 2003 Tom Cruise film ‘The Last Samurai’,which shows what happens when a group of elite warriors who have devoted their entire lives to the art and skill of combat meet one smug bastard with a hand-cranked gun that has between six and ten barrels and a maximum fire rate of 1,200 rounds per minute:
Tragic. The Maxim Gun was like that, except better. Maxim’s gun harnessed the recoil of each bullet to eject the spent cartrige and draw in the next. In this way, Maxim’s gun only needed one barrel to fire all of its bullets automatically. It was portable, mountable, and variations of the design would become standard issue on all sides of the coming war.
Up until this point, infantry combat had been a hand-to-hand affair. Even after strides in gun technology had rendered the sword obsolete, everyone got a bayonette. You fully expected to have to stab the guts out of your opponent, in such close proximity that you could smell his breath. War had always been hell; after all, there is no better way to turn a human being into a mere object than to kill them. In the First World War, though, the scale of and intensity of war’s brutal dehumanization would reach a magnitude far beyond what had ever been seen before.
It was due to the presence of machine guns like this one that trench warfare became the default mode of engagement in World War I; suppressing fire could coat large areas of the battlefield in seconds, taking down row after row of infantry with minimal effort. Trench warfare and the resultant state wherein both sides were essentially locked out of the conflict may be the reason chemical warfare came to be viewed as a practical measure; in many cases there was no way for one army to advance against the other without a mass casualty event. Virtually every front devolved into a war of attrition, with each side trading a life for a life. Soldiers could choose between staying put and gradually dying of trench illness and malnourishment, or stepping out of the trench to get filled with bullets. In the land between rival entrenchments, one could expect buried mines, clouds of poison gas, tangles of barbed wire, and strafing fire from aerial machine gunners.
The first tanks were designed to crawl over the difficult terrain of this No Mans Land, to beat down barbed wire fortifications, to sustain heavy damage from machine guns and explosives, and ultimately to break the deadlock. But tank designs that were actually effective would not see wide deployment until the next global conflict. This was a war of soft flesh being rendered obsolete by the colossal aberrations of its own material progress.
War Pigs
The cheapening of human life is a theme which can be traced through the first and second industrial revolutions; through this lense, World War I may be viewed as a vulgar display of the most destructive tendencies of the nascent world industrial culture.
Chemical, automatic, and schrapnel weapons were all used for the first time in World War 1. These were all exponents of the Second Industrial Revolution, and together they turned every front of the war in Europe into killing fields of unspeakable horror. The first poison gas attack on April 22, 1915 was described in a London newswire to the New York Times as ‘without a doubt the most awful form of scientific torture’.
For the first time, ship-mounted guns were deployed which could strike targets up to twenty miles inland. Airplane technology was still in its infancy, but a maxim-style gun mounted on a flying vehicle was a lethal innovation that proved essential. Meanwhile, the advanced engineering feat that was the German U-boat terrorized the seas, bringing swift and unseen annihilation from the deep.
The first European infantries to engage in the conflict still fought equipped with hats that were largely ceremonial or decorative. Facing off against unprecedented technological prowess, these first regiments were shredded. It is to this fact that we owe the first steel helmets of the post-industrial era.
I think it is safe to say that the First World War was horrifying and traumatic for everyone involved. It follows close on the heels of the Industrial and Technological Revolutions and shares a sympathetic resonance with both those phenomena.
This should come as no surprise, as the whole ordeal was very literally engineered by the same philosophical, financial and governmental superstructures which gave us child slaves and phossy jaw.
Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death's construction In the fields, the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
Oh lord, yeah!
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor...
