Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
involved chemical changes. Limestone could be roasted into calcinated lime
suitable for cement, sand melted into glass, clay baked into ceramics. Sulfur,
mercury, and alum all depended on chemical fire to pluck them loose from
gangue and then to purify them into their elemental core. (“Purify,” in fact,
derives from the English
purifien
which is cognate to the Greek word
pyr,
meaning fire.) Then there are the distillates: salt from sea water, nitric acid
from
aqua fortis,
alcohol, oils, and “sublimates” in general.Almost any chem-
ical reaction—the “art of alchemy,” whether true in its larger claims or not,
thought Biringuccio—relied “on the actions and virtues of fires.” Fire was
the chemical fulcrum by which humanity could leverage even its mechan-
ical power, by which it could make and move the hard tools that together
reshaped first-world nature into a second world of humanity. (More omi-
nously, he concludes his treatise with fire weaponry, cataloguing devices that
rely on fire to hurl projectiles or on the projectiles to kindle fire.) In the
end, the lithic cycle feeds itself: the iron burned out of the Earth becomes
the picks and shovels by which miners can dig more ore and the axes by
which to cut the timber they require for shoring and—most ardently—the
fuel they need for smelting and forging.
4
The cycle turns back on itself. While Biringuccio concludes with an
extended metaphor on “the fire that consumes without leaving ashes, that
is more powerful than all other fires, and that has as its smith the great son
of Venus,” the fires of
Pirotechnia
needed something real to burn. Here bio-
mass had an advantage: it could be more easily cooked because it could
itself burn. Stone could not, until industry found ways to burn fossil bio-
mass.What had once seemed an absurdity, the self-combustion of rock, has
in fact become the basis for our modern pyro-civilization.
FIREPOWERS
CONTROLLED—AND NOT-SO-CONTROLLED—FIRE AS A FORCE
OF CHANGE
Burning trees for ash and pitch could appeal to nature for its inspiration;
burning stone less so; but in both cases fire set by human hands met natu-
ral objects. There is no intrinsic reason, however, why humanity had to
restrict its torch to the things nature presented to it. Nor did they: pyrotech-
nology could go where people pleased and could just as readily obey a logic
other than that proposed by nature.
