Live Streaming: Great Adventure in the Wilderness

“The Stone Age began about 2.5 million years ago and lasted until approximately 7000 to 2000 years ago.”

“From monkeys, we learned to throw stones, and by the time of the apemen, we were already using stone axes.”

“The Bronze Age first started in the Mesopotamian civilization in the 4th millennium BC.”

“In Huaxia, the earliest unearthed bronze artifacts are the small bronze knives from the Gan-Su Majiayao culture, which date back to around 2800 BC. My history isn’t great, but that was probably the early Shang Dynasty, right?”

“In Ancient Egypt, bronze vessels appeared during the Second Dynasty, ushering in the Bronze Age.”

“The Aegean civilization existed during the same period.”

“And then, we have the Iron Age, which continues to this day.”

“The ancient Egyptians and Sumerians were the first known to use iron tools, as early as 4000 BC, but mostly they obtained iron from meteorites rather than extracting it from iron ore, which made it many times more expensive than gold.”

“It wasn’t until between 3000 BC and 2000 BC that Anatolia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia increasingly extracted iron from meteoritic iron.”

“In Huaxia, 5 iron-bladed bronze ‘ge’ from the Shang Dynasty of the 14th century BC have been excavated, which we call ‘Sky Metal’.”

“It was probably the Hittite Empire that first mass-produced iron and applied it, mastering iron smelting technology around 1400 BC. By 1200 BC, iron was widely used in the Middle East, but it hadn’t replaced bronze.”

“From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, and now the Iron Age, humans have used millions of years. This represents the progress of civilization and the progress of humanity.”

“This is the famed Three-Age System, dividing the development of human civilization into three stages based on materials.”

In Bi Fang’s description, the audience seemed to witness, beneath the long river of history, the piles and piles of burning charcoal, the blocks of black ore being put into the furnace that, under intense heat, transformed into dazzling red molten iron, pouring forth.

[Of the Four Ancient Civilizations, only we remain, ah, I’m proud!]

[Old Fang has really started to understand history, cover face, the pretentiousness reaches a new level]

[The progress of human civilization seems complicated, but in fact, it’s the change of materials. Ah.]

[Huaxia, impressive!]

Quite a few foreign netizens also expressed their admiration.

Ever since the discovery of iron, people began adding different components to it, changing its properties using different temperature processes, and achieving different microstructures through various techniques.

This seemingly limitless black metal became the most important pillar supporting the entire planet’s industrial civilization.

At the moment, Bi Fang planned to leap across millions of years of history, refining this indefinitely useful black metal in the most primitive wilderness.

[If human civilization were lost, Boss Fang’s live stream should be preserved]

[You might be able to restart a civilization]

[Epic]

Seeing such comments, Bi Fang joked while holding clay, “I guess I’m standing on the shoulders of giants now, with enough knowledge in physics, chemistry, biology, and the environment to achieve this goal. It looks like wilderness, but in fact, it’s a representation of the totality of human civilization.”

After laying a base with clay, Bi Fang applied more clay around the sides, making it look overall like a toilet.

The surroundings were all encased in clay, leaving only an opening nearly four square decimeters in size.

Once the structure was even with the ground level, Bi Fang added a protruding U-shaped mouth and said, “This is the chimney; it will handle all the gas exchange later.”

Having created a passageway, the construction now looked even more like a toilet.

Not far away, a water monitor that had returned to its cave peeked out its head once again, seemingly puzzled by what the towering creature in front of it was doing.

In its mind, hunting, eating, resting, and reproducing were the sole purposes of life.

Unable to grasp the situation, the water monitor scratched its skin with its claws, thinking about heading to the dock… to the water hole to catch a fish for lunch.

[It’s so similar, really too similar]

[Alright, now our dry toilet is completed, come and give it a try]

[Use it and burn at the same time]

[Others clean with water, Boss Fang’s has a drying function, the boss is just extraordinary]

Bi Fang laughed heartily; there was no denying that the stove did have an intriguing shape.

Seen from above, it indeed resembled a toilet, a squat one, but with a square fire mouth at the front.

After finishing, Bi Fang rolled the clay into long strips and baked them with fire. Once they had slightly dried and hardened, he placed them inside the furnace.

There was a slightly protruding platform underneath, left deliberately, perfect for placing the strips on.

“This is the furnace bridge. In the past, when burning coal, there was something called a furnace bridge in the stove. There was a saying, ‘the fire must be hollow,’ meaning coal needs oxygen to burn.”

“If the coal is tightly packed together without oxygen, it won’t ignite. You need to elevate the coal to facilitate air circulation for combustion, and that’s the job of the furnace bridge.”

“Normally, the furnace bridge is cast from pig iron, like an iron fence. Placed in the middle of the furnace, coal is put on top, and there’s a furnace door below for adjusting the fire by opening or closing it. We don’t have that feature here; it’s just to help with air circulation.”

After constructing the furnace bridge, Bi Fang promptly broke small branches, laid them on the “toilet,” and plastered them with more clay.

“This is the ventilation hole. We can’t let the clay block it. A layer of branches will secure it, preventing collapse. When it dries, it will take shape, and the branches don’t need to be removed; they will burn to ash.”

[To be honest, this stove is more advanced than those from the Great Leap Forward era.]

[High-Temperature Toilet: You can only use the toilet within a certain period of time, otherwise there’s a risk of roasting your behind.]

[Capitalist: Install these in my company! Replace all with these!]

[That’s impossible. Doesn’t fuel cost money? It might be more reasonable to charge for using slanted and timed toilets.]

The section Bi Fang smeared on served to separate the fire mouth from the “toilet”, and then he made a stone plate out of clay, based on the size of the fire mouth.

“The size of the stone plate must be larger than the fire mouth, to keep the heat away.”

After finishing the stone plate and letting it dry and harden naturally, Bi Fang patted his black-gray palms and sighed with relief, “Alright, spent the whole morning on this. Let’s have lunch then go to the river for more clay, and continue making chimneys and charcoal.”

Returning to the shelter, Bi Fang approached the water hole, ready to catch fish, but discovered that the remaining two fish had disappeared.

Glancing at the nearby mound, a fish bone was spat out not far away.

Bi Fang: “…”

…

At noon, Bi Fang once again reached the stream, and after catching three big fish, he strengthened the fishing grounds, increased their size, and threw the rotting fish guts into them. He also constructed another fishing ground further downstream.

“Normally, one fishing ground supplying two or three big fish and four or five small fish each day would be enough, but now that I have a thieving neighbor, one fishing ground just doesn’t suffice. Hence, I need to build another one, and place them far enough apart, preferably over two hundred meters.”

“Now let’s dig some more clay, pour in some clear water, and while we’re at it, gather some sugarcane and fishy grass.”

The benefits of returning to the camp site were evident at this moment, not only providing a stable supply of vegetables, but also a fixed supply of sweet fruits, which, though not overly sweet, were a rare delicacy.

Bi Fang shoveled clay into the form, it took three trips back and forth to fill the pit, then he lit the wood in the half-completed fire pit to speed up the drying process.

To his surprise, he found a paw print in the nearby clay…

[Hahaha, I can’t, I’m going to die laughing.]

[Can’t hit it, it’s not good to chase it away, what can I do? I can only keep it.]

[This is the first time I’ve seen a problem that even Old Fang can’t solve.]

Bi Fang massaged his temples. He had wanted to pour some water here to boil it for sterilization, but now it seemed he couldn’t leave it unattended for a second.

He sure didn’t want to drink water that water monitors had drunk from.

It had not been long since he left, but if he were away longer, wouldn’t he risk losing his spot to an opportunist?

[Old Fang: You dare to take over my territory?]

[Water Monitors: Clearly, you took over mine first!]

The audience burst into a frenzy of mockery.

Bi Fang shook his head, cleaned the fish, mixed them with fishy grass for a meal, and then, armed with a large amount of firewood, he went to another clearing.

“To smelt iron, even though we have a blast furnace, simply burning wood is not sufficient—we need a large amount of charcoal.”

[Honestly, I don’t really understand the difference…]

[Isn’t charcoal just wood burned? Does charcoal burn hotter than wood?]

[Blind spot in knowledge]

[It’s actually a physical chemistry fact that…]

“Indeed, it is a physical chemistry fact, but explaining it in detail would be too complicated, needing a lot of equations. Let me put it in simpler terms.”

Bi Fang built another suitable small structure on the ground using clay.

“Charcoal is a processed product of wood, but not something that you can burn in a regular stove; it’s produced in a high-temperature, oxygen-poor environment.

By then, the moisture in the wood has evaporated, and the structure itself has changed, internal combusting to a honeycomb-like structure, which ignites more easily, burns more efficiently, and produces little smoke.”

“When this honeycomb structure is burned, it generates a more intense combustion reaction, reaching higher temperatures.”

[I want to see the complicated explanation, haha]

“The complicated explanation would be, if we consider wood’s main chemical component ‘cellulose’ – which is basically composed of glucose, a ‘carbohydrate’.”

“Comparing glucose with charcoal you would be using ‘1mol of C6H12O6’ contrasted with pure carbon consisting of 6mol of carbon atoms.”

“Thus, the 6 water molecules in ‘C6H12O6’ remain water after combustion and do not produce much heat. The combustion heat mainly comes from the 6 carbon atoms.”

With this in mind, the combustion heat of wood and charcoal won’t be much different. You can check chemical handbooks to see the difference in combustion heat between the two.”

[The combustion heat of glucose is 2800kj/mol, while the equivalent amount of C combustion heat is 2361kj/mol. It’s confusing; the difference isn’t very big indeed.]

Bi Fang laughed, “So, after burning wood, you not only produce 6 molecules of carbon dioxide, but also 6 water molecules that need to be heated.”

“But with charcoal, you only have CO2 molecules!”

“Charcoal doesn’t have to take into account the heating of water molecules. After combustion, charcoal has fewer types and numbers of substances to heat.”

“That is the fundamental reason why the highest temperature of charcoal combustion is higher than that of wood!”

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