We’ve heard of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. And yet, we aren't commonly taught why those ages occurred in that order. Which is just too bad, since it's pretty darn interesting.

The Stone Age has a simple explanation. Stone is easier to work than metal, and more common. We figured out how to use it first.

Ancient humans actually did master use of some metal during this time period— namely meteoric iron, a natural alloy of nickel and iron present in iron meteorites. We sometimes heated it but more often shaped it, by cold hammering, into tools and arrowheads; the stuff was quite difficult to work.

The ancient Inuit inhabitants of Greenland, though, used iron much more extensively than other Stone Age people. Greenland has the world's only major deposit of telluric iron, also called native iron, which is iron that occurs in its pure metal state.

Looking for the right tool to advance our evolution

Native copper, however, is found worldwide (as are native gold, silver, and platinum, all of which are of limited use for tools.) The hardest and strongest common native metal on Earth, copper proved one of the most useful.

Eventually we learned to smelt metals from ore and, around 2500 BC, learned to alloy the two together to make bronze, kicking off The Bronze Age. Tin was somewhat rare outside the British Isles, parts of China, and South Africa, so it actually ended up commanding prices higher than gold in many regions. We frequently used zinc, more common than tin, to produce brass.

Iron smelting first occurred circa 1800 BC but didn't become common until 1200 BC. Eventually, of course, iron became the metal of choice for civilization—it's just much stronger than most of the other options.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy, and I quote:

“Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.”

— Reed Hastings

All traffic isn't created equal.

For example, you've likely noticed that the morning rush hour often has greater traffic coming into the city from the suburbs and that the evening rush hour traffic clogs up the outbound lanes.

So, we tend to have traffic moving much more slowly in one direction than the other.

Accidents and our tendency to rubberneck them also cause the traffic to bunch in one direction. (Yes, we can keep listing these reasons for a while.) Unfortunately, building new lanes for our roadways can be prohibitively expensive, and it often isn't even possible, especially where bridges are concerned.

There is a fascinating solution, though:

Road zippers are heavy vehicles that have the ability to move concrete lane dividers across a lane, widening the road for one direction of traffic, narrowing it for the other. This requires a special type of moveable barrier, with shorter segments linked together by flexible steel connectors.

The road zipper, plus new barriers, are far, far cheaper than an entirely new lane. They actually pick up the segment lines using a little conveyor system, essentially acting on the same principles as a screw or a ramp (though Jeff Mann, The Yard Ramp Guy, might think I'm stretching that definition a bit).

Road zippers can move the lane at up to a top speed of 10 mph, depending on traffic, and is much safer than trying to manage traffic with cones and lights. They're especially useful on bridges. Crews on the Golden Gate Bridge have been employing a road zipper since 2010 to manage rush hour traffic, to great effect.

Any road crew that's worked on a bridge isn't going to have particularly fond memories of dealing with bridge traffic, and the road zipper provides an effective solution. We can also use this method to speed up bridge re-decking projects, moving the barrier to protect the work zone.

Transportation authorities utilize road zippers all around the world, and they're especially popular in the United States and Australia. Many cities use them on a permanent basis, while others lease them temporarily during construction work.

Even if they weren't so useful logistically, I'd still like them: they're just plain cool.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy, while I like your sports quotes (go, team), I tend to stay on topic:

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

— Lewis Carroll

Don Justo at age 85

Some people’s work ethics are entirely too formidable. I'm by no means a lazy man, but sometimes even I like to relax and spend an entire day on the lake with a fishing pole.

Not Justo Gallego Martínez. Known also as Don Justo, he is a former monk, living in Spain, and he’s been building his own cathedral for decades.

After eight years of living in a Trappist monastery, he left the order due to tuberculosis. And he promised himself that he would build a shrine if he recovered. Don Justo started work on the cathedral in 1961.

Martínez's work begins each morning at 6 AM and lasts for about ten hours a day. He takes off only on Sundays. He has missed but a handful of days during the decades of the cathedral’s construction, and he’s done the vast majority of the work completely alone, though he does have a helper these days.

When he started, there was no plan. He just leveled the ground and started building. To this day, he regularly changes the design, according to inspiration or whim. The cathedral doesn't have any planning permissions from the city of Mejorada del Campo, nor does it have the blessing of any part of the Catholic Church.

Despite the lack of city permissions, Don Justo hasn't had to deal with any real trouble from the city. Most residents are quite proud of it, though a small number consider it an eyesore.

Most of the materials he uses for construction are recycled. Local construction companies and a nearby brick factory frequently donate excess material to the project. Frequently, he also folds everyday objects into the design. For example, he molded his columns with old oil drums.

I've thrown up a few sheds in my life, but a whole cathedral? I don't have a fraction of the ambition to handle that. And then there’s Don Justo, who doesn't even use a crane. And he's 90 now. Not for me.

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Quotable

That other Yard Ramp Guy keeps on quoting, and, I must say, his choices are pretty good, if a bit too tilted toward sports. Oh, well. As Michael Jordan said, “Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.” So, en garde, Yard Ramp Guy:

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

— Milton Berle

I've heard everyone—from my coworkers to the news outlets—describe ours as a wireless society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A fun little statistic: In 2006, we transmitted less than one percent of all international data traffic via satellite. The percentage is a little higher today, but we continue to route the overwhelming majority of data through undersea fiber optic cables that stretch between every continent except Antarctica. Countries around the world consider them absolutely vital to their economies.

We've been laying underwater cable for a long time. Those first put into service were telegraphy cables, laid in the 1850s, though experimentation with the cables went back as far as the early 1840s (just a couple years after the invention of the telegraph). And during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union tapped into and cut each others' cables.

Laying the cables today is immensely expensive. We spend billions of dollars each year on the process. And, while the cost has gone down a bit, it's still normal to see price tags hitting tens of thousands of dollars per mile.

Submarine cables also break, and they break frequently. Fishing trawlers, anchors, earthquakes, turbidity currents (giant underwater landslides), and shark bites are all major causes of these breakages. We're not entirely sure why sharks like biting them so much.

Repairing them is a difficult and costly process, involving specialized repair ships that lower grapples to lift the broken ends of the cables to the surface for repair. We employ different types of grapples, depending on the seafloor around the break (for example: rocky vs. sandy). In shallower waters, we can use submarines to repair the cables.

Politicians thrive on producing drama about literally anything. While drama over oil and such tend to hog most of the media attention, submarine cables are a really big deal.

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Quotable

I see that that other Yard Ramp Guy has started offering up quotations in his weekly blog. Always up for a challenge and, um, not to be outdone, I challenge him to a Quote-Off. En garde.

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

—Henry David Thoreau

The second car I ever owned was a used Chevy Vega. Despite it being a complete rust pile that broke down on a monthly basis, I loved that car. (Well, it did cure me of any later desire to become a gearhead; I like cars, but that thing really took the joy out of my tinkering with fixing engines.)

I'm not here to complain about the defective axles, self-incendiary tendencies, leaky engines, backfiring, etc. I want to talk about the single coolest feature of the Vega: the way it was shipped.

These days, we're used to cars being hauled down the road by semis, but in the 70s they were hauled on railway flatcars—the longer 85- and 89-footers. They could pack 15 cars onto those tri-level racks, but it didn't even come close to the maximum weight per flatcar.

The price to move a loaded railcar from the assembly plant to the Pacific coast was about $4,800. At more than $300 per car, Chevy wanted to push that price down quite a bit.

And Chevy ended up with a pretty novel solution: shipping them vertically, nose down. They designed a specialized rack for the Vega known as the Vert-A-Pac, allowing an 89-foot flatcar to hold as many as 30 cars.

Chevy still wanted to ship them all topped off with fluids, but any normal car would leak all over the railroad. Chevy designed the Vega specifically to prevent leaks during vertical shipping. This included innovative alterations like a special engine oil baffle, battery filler caps, and a windshield wiper bottle set at a 45-degree angle.

In 1970, after Chevy discontinued the Vega, they also discontinued the Vert-A-Pacs because they were exclusively designed for Vegas.

All scrapped—vehicle and its innovative shipment method, which was repurposed.

Yes, my bias here, though I think this was one of the rare events where the way a company shipped something was much better than the thing itself.