How did ancient civilizations make furnaces hot enough to melt metals like copper or iron with just charcoal, wood, coal, clay, dirt and stone?
In: Engineering
Pretty easily. Especially copper.
I’ve personally built my own cheap and fast “forge” to mess around with as a teen. It was as low tech as it gets.
I dug around a 1 foot deep hole, about a foot wide and 5 feet long. Then I took a pole and made a diagonal hole that opened up into the bottom of the trench.
The hole was so I could pump air into the base of the fire.
Then I literally just filled the hole with wood and kept burning it.
Now I used an air compressor to pump air into my hole as a bellows, but a more crude bellows would work fine.
Worked fine for the random small bits of scrap iron fixtures and stuff I had lying around.
Wasn’t an amazing setup, but I made it entirely with a shovel, wood, and a piece of pipe in a handful of hours. I have 0 doubts in an ancient civilization’s ability to make something far more efficient and better than that.
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