On How to Make Everything, my goal is to attempt to make ordinary items from scratch
but one thing I haven't tried to do is to make the tools necessary making these items
On this episode I'm going to try and take things one step further and make all my own tools
But what makes it so hard is that in order to make a tool you first have to make the tools to make that tool
and well you'll see...
My name is Annie George and like most people I have no idea where
the stuff I use every day actually comes from
Thanks to modern transportation a web of industries have built up to provide us with everything we need
but what if that network didn't exist? We'd need to do everything ourselves
My mission is to collect the raw materials and
transform them into the final products we use every day
doing every step myself, personally
This is How to Make Everything
While a handful of animals employ simple tools, tools are the cornerstone
of humanity's success and ascension to the primary species of this planet.
Every device and mechanism we use today is a result of millions of years of tools
being used to make better tools
Starting from the simple spear to modern airplane
My aim for this episode is to start from nothing like we did three million years ago
and make a modern hammer
Of course to make this hammer there's a whole collection of other tools i'll be
forced to make along the way.
But before I can get started I'll need to take a crash course on tool-making
and learn three million years of human innovation in just a couple of days
Well... I don't have anytime to waste
Perhaps one of humanity's earliest tools was fire mastered possibly as early as
1 million years ago, allowing humans to cook food and provide light and protection at night
the control of fire was one of humanity's earliest and most crucial
tools to learn
I'm here with Paul, a boy scout, who's gonna teach me how to get started on making fire
You basically just run this back and forth and it will eventually char some of this up
and you add it to your nest and blow on it until it's on fire, then add more
there's another friction way where you can take a string and you make like a bow
and you put it in, twist it, and then for this you need you really
it's easy here if you have two people but you need something to hold the top
and then when you're doing this it will turn
another easier way without the bow is
we can take a little more this
and we both can take turns going like this
Ok
Now you grab on and keep going
Have you been able to do it with a drill before?
Um... I haven't but i've seen other boy scouts do it
We can do the Flint that works really well
like that
And that will burn for a while so you can start getting your actual sticks going
so if you want to do it all, you can take the knife and scrape that
there you go
You can just push it in... I think we have fire
so now that you've built a fire you can have your fireman chit
it's kind of like a driver's license but for fire
all right so we got fire built , thanks to the expert guidance of Paul
I've learned some really good fire building techniques and skills and next up
I'll be learning how to do flint knapping to make my own flint tools