On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote: >On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > >>On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote: >> >> >>> sciences either. They at least have *some* chemistry (petroleum >>> refining), but we don't know how recent a development that is. >> >>I think "petroleum" is a mistranslation. > >I don't see why "petroleum" would be a mistranslation since it >just means "rock-oil" in Latin. > >Also, it turns out that the process of petroleum refining goes back >several centuries (in our universe, I mean); I think I read somewhere >that the alchemists of the Muslim Golden Age figured it out. At any >rate, it requires a lower tech level than one might think. Huge >refineries for large-scale gasoline production are a modern invention, >of course. > By the way, I found my source for my above contention, which is "Guns, Germs and Steel", by Jared Diamond, which is a fascinating book, and I recommend to everyone here. It might at some point be interesting to analyze Dragaera according to Diamond's notions of how societies develop. At any rate, this is page 247 from the trade PB edition of that work: A good illustration of the histories of trial and error involved is furnished by the development of gunpowder and gasoline from raw materials. Combustible natural products inevitably make themselves noticed, as when a resinous log explodes in a campfire. By 2000 B.C., Mesopotamians were extracting tons of petroleum by heating rock asphalt. Ancient Greeks discovered the uses of various mixtures of petroleum, pitch, resins, sulfur, and quicklime as incendiary weapons, delivered by catapults, arrows, firebombs, and ships. The expertise at distillation that medieval Islamic alchemists developed to produce alcohols and perfumes also let them distill petroleum into fractions, some of which proved to be even more powerful incendiaries. Delivered in grenades, rockets, and torpedoes, those incendiaries played a key role in Islam's eventual defeat of the Crusaders. By then, the Chinese had observed that a particular mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter, which became known as gunpowder, was especially explosive. An Islamic chemical treatise of about A.D. 1100 describes seven gunpowder recipes, while a treatise from A.D. 1280 gives more than 70 recipes that had proved suitable for diverse purposes (one for rockets, another for cannons). As for postmedieval petroleum distillation, 19th-century chemists found the middle distillate fraction useful as fuel for oil lamps. The chemists discarded the most volatile fraction (gasoline) as an unfortunate waste product -- until it was found to be an ideal fuel for internal-combustion engines. Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?