couple of years now is a thought
experiment let’s imagine that this has
actually happened there’s been some kind
of global catastrophe a doomsday event
an apocalypse and civilization has
collapsed and the vast majority of
humanity has died but we’ve all survived
Bree let’s say that this lecture theatre
was Saturn right now who served as some
kind of hardened bunker and we have
survived the end of the world
when the rest of humanity has perished
well what now what would you need to
know not just in a short term not just
to survive but in the long term how
could you go about rebuilding a society
from scratch for yourself what’s the
most important scientific understanding
the most important technological
know-how you would want to have
preserved and written down so that
knowledge doesn’t get lost to history
again what book would you want in your
hands but serves as some kind of
QuickStart rebooting guide for
civilization itself so you could avoid
another Dark Ages accelerate the
recovery of civilization and rebuild
pretty much to where we’ve got to today
of the apocalypse well that’s the book
as a research scientist and writer that
I’ve tried to create I’ve tried to
create this reboot guide for
civilization itself as a way of peering
behind the scenes of how our modern
world actually works the things we just
take for granted in our modern lives and
what has enabled civilization to
progress and advance over the centuries
and millennia of history so what we’re
really talking about here
is how could you do this for real how
could you mine craft for real how can
you start in a blank empty landscape and
gather and collect all of the raw
materials and substances that you need
to provide for yourself and for your for
your society and use them in
combinations with each other to make the
tools and the mechanisms and the
chemistry that you need to support
yourself and what I like to focus on for
this talk is how could you go about
spreading the ideas that are worth
spreading if you’re starting again from
scratch in this post-apocalyptic
hypothetical scenario what’s the
technology you’d want to redevelop as
quickly as possible to share your
understanding amongst everyone else who
survived as you recover and regrow now
in our history the critical invention
that revolutionized society was the
invention of the printing press because
before the printing press if you wanted
to share human ideas if you wanted to
copy knowledge and share it amongst
people
the only way to do that is by filling an
entire room full of people like we have
here and get them to copy out a book
letter by letter in handwriting with
scribes and it’s incredibly laborious
and time-consuming and expensive and
that means very rich powerful people get
to choose which ideas are allowed to
spread there’s a choke point on history
and the transmission of ideas with a
printing press it’s almost as if
knowledge itself becomes democratic
anyone can share any ideas they like
with anyone else so what I want to share
with you today is how do you go about
making a book from absolute scratch as a
writer I want to tell you how to make
your own book and this for me has been a
voyage of of personal discovery during
the course of this research project I’ve
learned the enormous and
and create a lot of objects and
artifacts which I’ve got to show some of
this afternoon to show to you now the
four fundamental things need for making
a book kind of makes sense you need
paper nude ink you need little bits of
letters of a movable type and you need a
printing press and the basic principle
behind what you do here is take your
movable metal type your letters lay them
out a nice grid to build up the the
pages of text ink those with some very
nice thick viscous black ink and then
use a printing press to play some firm
but very even pressure to squeeze down a
piece of paper and transfer that writing
over a hundred times faster you could
ever write it out with handwriting but
if you want to make a book from scratch
this is the process you will need to
cover if you’re going right back to
scratch of how do you make the movable
type you need to know how you cast metal
to make metal you know how to you smelts
from ore and charcoal if you’re making
ink you need to know what ingredients go
into that and what should be clear from
this simplified diagram this is
essentially the recipe for Minecraft and
making a book from scratch what you need
to gather from your natural environment
and combine in different ways to print a
book for yourself and what should be
clear from this diagram is just how
crucial trees are not just providing
timber for construction for building
things but for providing the very
chemistry and the substances that our
societies relied upon for hundreds and
thousands of years and of course also
important fire an application of heat
has been for things as fundamental as
how do I get metal to come out of a rock
and just some of those encapsulated in
this diagram of how you go right back to
basics to make a book and the bid I’d
like to focus on for this talk is how do
you cast that metal type how do you pour
molten metal into molds create the tiny
letters which you then arranged in two
rows for printing now contrary to what’s
commonly thought it wasn’t actually
Johann Gutenberg who first invented
movable metal type printing it was some
monks in in Cheongju in Korea good 60
years before Gutenberg and they used
move all metal type to print a Buddhist
text called GG in the year thirteen
seventy seven and understand how they
did that how they printed the very first
book using simple techniques i traveled
out to korea to visit a traditional
master to learn that craft of making a
book from scratch of making the movable
metal type and i’ve got a short video
for you now that shows that process that
i learnt what you’re about to see is how
you start from little wooden blocks with
the letters engraved into them which are
packed into sand to create a sand cast
and then pouring the molten metal to
so this is why madness and costing is
such a time-consuming Moroz process to
such you have to build that tree you
have to create the channel from the
[Music]
and this is what I created from that
process this is the metal type I founded
myself in Cheongju and Korea and I think
this is an artifact is absolutely
beautiful almost represents the tree of
knowledge itself cast miss in this
beautiful bronze and the last step in
that process would be to break off those
individual blocks of type each with a
different character file it down a
little bit smooth it off and then
arrange it in rows for printing now you
should have seen from that video that
although you can cast metal type using
that sand casting technique that simple
technique it’s still pretty slow and
laborious it requires a lot of skill and
uncraft me ship and the revolution that
Gutenberg came up with was how to
mass-produce that metal type itself the
device that he invented to replace the
sand casting is this little type casting
mold here and all you’ve got are
essentially two l-shaped halves of that
mold with a cuboidal hole in the middle
where you put your matrix you put the
letter you’re trying to cast and the
bottom that hole pouring a molten metal
then it cool for a little bit and then
just slide apart the two halves and your
piece of metal type pops out it’s
incredibly quick and effortless to
mass-produce metal type using this
invention the Gutenberg came up with so
if the printing press is the tool that
used for mass producing human ideas for
for sharing the ideas of the worth
sharing then it’s this which is the tool
for creating the tools for sharing human
knowledge this is the step beneath that
in that chain now one of the things that
I was incredibly smug with myself when I
was going through this research project
of how could you start civilization from
scratch and reboot if he ever had to was
I realized that in the pages of this
book I could explain to you how to make
your own paper from scratch I could
explain how to make your own ink and I
could explain how to construct a rude
printing press so it’s almost as if
within the pages of this book it
contains the genetic instructions for
its own reproduction tongue-in-cheek of
course only a single copy of the
knowledge would need to survive the
apocalypse and it tells you the book
tells you how to make more books it can
replicate and divide almost like an
organism and to put my money where my
mouth was I did this I created or
printer two pages of the book on
handmade paper printed with a simple
primitive printing press and indeed this
page here is the page of the book that
explains how you make a primitive
printing press printed using a primitive
printing press on to homemade paper this
page here is essentially that book
reproducing itself like an organism
which I loved as a concept now you’ll
also know that in in modern books when
they’re published there’s an author
photograph a portrait on the back
perhaps with the author looking 3/4 onto
the camera with a hand on the chin
looking ever so self-satisfied and and
smug with themselves and for this
project I wanted even the author
photograph to remain true to the premise
of the book I wanted to make a
photograph from scratch myself I wanted
to take a selfie in the truest and
deeper sense you could ever take a
selfie so I went down to Lacock Abbey
where photography was invented in the
1830s 1840s and I worked with a
photographic historian there to mix
together our very simple silver
containing chemistry douse that emulsion
onto a single plate of glass load of
that into a primitive single lens camera
and have my photo taken had a selfie
created what I’m about to show you is I
swear the most egotistical slide you’re
about to see doesn’t get any worse than
this and this is the photo that I had
taken now what you’ll notice is that I
look a little bit Stern I look a little
bit glum in this picture
and that’s because this is no snapshot
that simple silver chemistry that we
mixed ourselves is very slow to respond
to the light we had to use a 15 second
exposure for that picture and I would
challenge any one of you sat here right
now to sit for 15 seconds absolutely
dead still not allowing your facial
muscles to relax or twitch and slightest
or your head to jittery or shoulders to
relax the tiniest movement over 15
seconds and your entire face blurs in
this ghostly apparition has happened for
most of the pictures we tried to take on
this day and what you can’t see is that
behind me in this picture there was a
wrought iron stand with a skull clamp
locked through the base of my head – how
my skull absolutely still fits entire
exposure so I would put it to you that
the reason all of our earliest
photographs of Victorian gentleman and
ladies the reason they looked so joyless
and Stern wasn’t cuz they didn’t know
how to party
back in a Victorian they were all on the
laudanum they were having more fun then
that we’re having now but it’s an
artifact of the technology that was
available at the time we are literally
looking at our ancestors through a
distorted lens or at least through
distorting photographic chemistry and
again for proof of principle this is a
selfie that I made myself on that day
and it was more effort than it was worth
I’ll I’ll be honest you to do that more
often than not now if you took this
premise seriously if you really did
think that civilization was about to
collapse there’s an apocalypse upon us
and you wanted to try to preserve and
save the very core of our civilization a
kernel of the most vital knowledge that
you would protect somewhere so that it
can then expand and flower again after
the end of the world you could do
something like this you could build vast
treasure troves of knowledge of books of
libraries and have them full with
practical guides on metalwork
King and woodworking and how to grow
your own food and the very basic
elements of of navigation or medicine
but the pond with that is that great big
piles of books don’t actually stick
around all that long but they’re
flammable they can burn they molder if
they start start getting too wet but
with modern technology we’ve got an
alternative now with something like an
e-reader you can load onto that ereader
an entire library of useful information
you can hold in the palm of your hand
10,000 books of useful knowledge as well
as perhaps some novels and poetry to
make life worth living after the
apocalypse but the problem here is if
you did have the sum total human
knowledge saved on your on your Kindle
or your e-reader soon as your pocket
comes and the grid goes down you can
realize you can’t recharge your Kindle
you can’t plug it into the mains to
recharge again so what I’ve created what
I’ve hacked is an apocalypse proof
Kindle apocalypse proof ereader I bought
one secondhand off the internet for
about 20 quid here it is here and I’ve
modded it I’ve hacked it by adding some
second-hand solar panels which I’ve sold
it together I’ve connected all together
with tabbing wire wire that back into
the bottom of the Kindle and this now is
10,000 books that library of human
knowledge in upon my hand safe and sound
as soon as those batteries run out I can
just leave it out in the Sun and
recharge that in deafening keep that
knowledge alive so if you did think the
apocalypse is coming you get something
like this loaded up with 10,000 the most
useful books and include things about
how to copy that knowledge for yourself
the capabilities making paper and ink
and a printing press and remain
spreading the ideas that deserve to be spread after the apocalypse thank you