Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Its titles are thus important.Treating domesticated fire as though it were
a mechanical device can cause troubles. It is a truism that how people per-
ceive fire will influence how they respond to its powers and problems. Such
perceptions are also complex, for fire's symbolic power has always matched
its practical power.The care of fire became the paradigm for domestication;
the application of fire became equally the paradigm of technics, of the
innumerable crafts that require fire or rely on the tools that fire renders and
assists. Fire remains, above all, the great transmuter. It is, for poets and
philosophers as much as for engineers, the essence and model of change,
not solely for the things it personally combusts but more widely for the
infinity of things its applied heat softens, melts, molds, speeds up, and
powers.
Over millennia fire has itself been transmuted. No Paleolithic hunter
would likely recognize the fire in a pump-action shotgun; no Neolithic
swiddener the flames buried in a tractor or the nitrogenous fertilizer
sprayed by a portable power pump; no priest the theophanous fire behind
a fluorescent lamp; no natural philosopher the fiery prime mover, fed on
fossil fuel, beyond the sublunary world, turning the geared wheels of indus-
try; no poet the quintessential combustion that makes software possible. In
truth, as the third millennium dawns, one can improve little on the obser-
vation of Pliny the Elder, the great Roman naturalist of the first century
A.D., as he pondered the role of controlled fire on remaking rock.
At the conclusion of our survey of the ways in which human intelligence
calls art to its aid in counterfeiting nature, we cannot but marvel at the fact
that fire is necessary for almost every operation. It takes the sands of the
Earth and melts them, now into glass, now into silver or various forms of
lead, or some substance useful to the painter or the physician. By fire min-
erals are disintegrated and copper produced: in fire is iron born and by fire
is it subdued: by fire gold is purified: by fire stones are burned for the bind-
ing together of the walls of houses. Fire is the immeasurable, uncontrollable
element, concerning which it is hard to say whether it consumes more or
produces more.
2
PROMETHEUS UNCHAINED
Call them, collectively, pyrotechnologies. Begin, however, with the tech-
nology of fire itself, because the power fire promised could happen only if
one could create and control fire at will. Fire had to be present when
