¶ Civil War (1)
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Index Entry
Civil War:
"Now I’ll give you something we can talk about like ‘might makes right.’ And this stone and compressiveness was really the might. Big massiveness did the trick. And really to understand how man over the ages was moved by this rather than his tensile ability… More or less his intellectual ability. And that was very inferior; at best it was only one-tenth of the compressor. Now man gradually learned to make metal out of the stone and the first thing he made was daggers. That’s all he had. Then he could make some of the bigger swords, and then maybe armour. Armour for the head man and then a little armour for several of the soldiers. But it was still rather negligible.
“It is not until we get to production of steel in 1851, only a little more than a century ago, that we suddenly have steel available in a big way. Production of steel was 1851… what is called common steel at that time. Common steel came up to 50,000 pounds tensile strength. In 1851 tension came to parity with compression. And with this ability then to have much longer spans to hold walls together. So men used then not stone walls but steel beams. Or they might use a long, wooden beam with a steel rod below it to keep it up in the middle. You saw stone building with iron stars out here.”
¶ Citations
- Univ, of Alaska, pp.13-14, 20 Apr '72
