Re: Stirling's _The Sunrise Lands_ and misc thoughts

In article <1191854038.052125.243110@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mark_Reichert@xxxxxxxxxxx (Mark_Reichert@xxxxxxxxxxx) says...

But how expensive is its manufacture after 12 years of peace in which
to concentrate on technological advancement of very useful things like
paper? I have no knowledge of what the relative cost of paper was
before the Industrial revolution.

Which industrial revolution? There were two, you know.

Paper manufacture from wood is fairly simple. It was invented in 1838.
You just pulp the wood with lye and press or roll it into sheets. When
the sheet dries, you have paper. Lye is very simple to manufacture, and
the chemicals can mostly be recycled out of the residue. Unbleached
paper making doesn't produce dioxins and furans, so it's not very
polluting. Chlorine is easy to manufacture, but produces a raft of
toxic chemicals. Paper can be bleached using oxygen, if you have to
have white paper.

I wasn't even really thinking of reading and writing. Paper is useful
stuff. Wax paper would be very handy in a kitchen without plastics, and
oil paper was a very popular light transmitting window covering when
glass wasn't available.

The real technology that should have been in place was food preservation
by canning. I know I would have busted a gut trying to manufacture
canning lids for all those glass jars out there. The pressure of a
cooker wouldn't matter, as long as it got hot enough to sterilize
botulin spores. In days before refrigeration, you smoked, jerked,
salted or canned meat. A cured and smoked ham will last 3 months if you
bury it in dry wood ashes. Jerky will last a long time, as will canned
meat. You can dry apples, berries and grapes to preserve them, but
fresh canned pears and peaches are a delight, and don't dry for squat.

In the absence of electricity, someone could make a mint by setting up a
foundry and casting wood burning kitchen range parts. There are better
things to do with car parts than make swords.

One thing that would make Salem worth recolonizing almost immediately is
the mill race at the Mission Mill Museum. There is a turbine in the
basement that IIRC produced about 60 hp. They refurbished it in the
'70s as a small scale hydro project, and were using it to generate
electricity, but it would still run a shaft that used to power a bunch
of the mill. The turbine is only a small part of the horsepower
available at that location on Mill Creek. I have seen an old machine
shop run off a shaft, using wooden pulleys and leather belts. You can
run a lathe, drill press, grinder, etc. Most modern tools could be run
easily from a belt.

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