Total layman but I assumed that lignin was the molecule that was actually making the wood hard ? How does removing it improves hardness ? Why is there an optimal amount ?
As for the reason it wasn't my wild guess would be that they were already mining for coal so it may have been more economical to just dig the ground with quasi-slaves rather than having more competition on the wood resource and waiting for it to boil whereas you can just produce steel bar by the kilometer in a factory.
Labor is a necessary component of the finished goods. Therefore its source, cost, availability, and "externalities" relative to competing formulations is indeed relevant.
Yes, but the situation they describe, where mining was cheaper than today, would not be sufficient to explain the non-adoption of this process at the time, even if it were true.
> Removing some lignin allows you to compact the wood more.
Yes, lignin puffs up the wood, when some of it is removed by boiling and then heated up and pressed at the same time, carbon molecules bond with each other exponentially more.
I was researching this subject two - three years back. Anything that needs to be able to move at some point, benefits a lot by being 6 times lighter. Also buildings are always constrained by their weight when trying to make them as tall as possible.
I'd argue that it is to the point insofar as the price of labor is important to the competitiveness of a finished product, isn't it so ?
I think your response stems from the fear of me trying to turn this into something "political" but it seems to me that going down the mine has been really hard work and low pay for most of History. I am pretty sure that most historians would agree that mining is one of the easiest use of slave labor (go down the mine and bring back the stuff failing which you will be punished, also no skills required) from the point of view of slave owner/manager that is. I am also sure they would agree that after the abolition of slavery, you could consider a big chunk of mine workers, quasi slaves. Hell, even today, mining is one of the main use for drug-addicted labor force in Myanmar and child labor in Congo.
Our ancestors in the 1800s worked under conditions we find atrocious, because that was the best work they could get. Not because they were some kind of slaves.
By 2025 standards, the 1890s were a time of extreme poverty, low technology, and medical ignorance. Life was short and hard, but also much better than a century earlier.
In a century, people will hopefully say the same about our time.
It was only the best work they could get because they had been forced out of the countryside by cost increases, automation, and centralization of land ownership. They teach about the enclosure of the fields in schools for a reason: what had once been communal property of villages throughout England became the exclusive property of the nobility. By and large, if people had a choice they preferred to remain a peasant: you lived in the countryside, breathed clean air, stayed close to the friends, family, and community you were raised with, were self-sufficient, had space and time to raise a family, worked on your own schedule (at least day-to-day), didn't have to let some 'boss' treat you like a slave, didn't have to fear being 'fired', so on and so forth.
To quote an economist (Branko Milanovic) who's done work on this topic in the context of 19th century Serbia attempting to industrialize their peasant population:
> All contemporary evidence points to the fact that peasants were not at all keen to move to cities and work for a wage. Since there was no landlessness very few people were pushed by poverty to look for city jobs. Political parties which strongly (and understandably) represented peasantry further limited mobility of labor by guaranteeing homestead (3.5 ha of land, house, cattle, and the implements) which could not be alienated, neither in the case of default on a loan nor in the case of overdue taxes.
> This situation was very typical for the late industrializers in South-East Europe. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia were all overwhelmingly agricultural with small peasant landholdings and no landlessness. All displayed slow or arrested capitalist development and half-hearted urbanization. The reason was simple: farmers had no incentive to move from being self-employed to being hired labor. And who would prefer to switch from being one’s own boss and dependent perhaps only on the elements to become a hired hand, working six days a week all year round, in “satanic mills”?
> ...
> The question is, how do you industrialize under such conditions? Reluctance of peasants, whenever they had their own land, to become industrial workers has been discussed (Gerschenkron, Polanyi). In England they had to be literally chased from land through enclosures; in France, the process was much more overdrawn and took a century; in Germany, Poland and Hungary, large estates owned by nobility and consequent landlessness did the job. In Russia, it was bloody and occurred through forced collectivization.
> ...
> The process whereby agricultural economies industrialized was wrenching. The displacement and unhappiness of the population dragged into industrial centers through either empty stomachs or outright terror was incomparable in its human costs to today’s similar transfer of labor from manufacturing to services (or to unemployment). The transformation in the underlying economic structure is never easy but it seems to me that the one from the fresh air and freedom of own farm to being a cog in a huge soiled machine of industrialization was the most painful.
Being "forced out of" work by automation is how we have progressed during the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution. It continues today.
Fewer people can produce as much food as before, so the people not needed for food production can start producing other things.
This can of course be a tragedy for the people left without work, but for society at a macro level it is hugely beneficial.
This era in England has a bad reputation, and by our standards it was awful, but by objective measures like average lifespan, population size and technological progress, it was a time of unprecedented progress and material improvement for common people.
Did people lose a sense of community as they left their ancestral villages. Probably, and I don't know how to weigh that against our immense wealth today.
Why do we demand that the price of progress be paid by those people least able to pay? Why is it that the people who work, who produce everything that we rely on to survive, are also the ones who suffer, whose life-plans are upended, whose homes are taken away, whose bodies are mangled -- while the rich, who contribute little other than "management of capital", are fine and dandy?
If someone were to say to you, today, that your career was over, and that the only choice was to go work in a mine -- and moreover, that thanks to the great pressure of unemployed laborers in the same boat as you, safety standards had fallen by the wayside? Would you consider that a "necessary cost" for progress? If not, then what's the bar? When do you consider it acceptable to tell someone, who trained for years and years to do something useful for the community, that due to technological developments on the other side of the continent they need to find a new job, slash their budget, abandon their home, give up plans of having a family?
It's easy to say "they should learn to code" -- wait, but now coding's not the place to be, is it? The rate at which these shifts happen has accelerated, continues to accelerate, and is already well past the ability of people to re-skill mid-career.
We already have enough resources to feed and house every person in the US (and the world, though I admit the logistics there are a bit tougher). If automation actually meant that the broader population -- no, not their hypothetical grandchildren -- would become more prosperous, perhaps it would be something worth celebrating. But as is, growth for the sake of growth, at the cost of suffering that could easily be avoided had we a different economic system, seems hard to justify in my eyes.
As for the reason it wasn't my wild guess would be that they were already mining for coal so it may have been more economical to just dig the ground with quasi-slaves rather than having more competition on the wood resource and waiting for it to boil whereas you can just produce steel bar by the kilometer in a factory.