And it is still used today. I painted the bottom of my boat with black bituminous paint. Wonderful stuff, and it has some pretty unique properties that surprised me while I watched it weather for the first few years.
Bitumen really is a wonderful thing, I'm surprised how few people know about it or use it.
If you've ever got to protect steel outdoors or underwater, I 100% recommend it as the simple, low-cost, high quality option. I would recommend one of the more modern mixtures like Epifanes Black Bottom, of which €15 will get you a liter (8-10m2 of one layer), €50 will get you four liters, just throw it over clean or dirty steel with a standard roller or brush and you're done. Make sure to do minimum 2 (ideally 3) layers, check that it's not collecting (large drips or puddles anywhere will take months to harden!), and put it on generously - you'll be rewarded with one of the best low-tech coatings money can buy.
Oh, and I just remembered bitumen tape - somewhere around $10-$20 will get you a large roll of the best tape on the planet (Commonly sold as bitumen roof tape at Home Depot.) Definitely not as versatile as duct tape, but it will stick to _absolutely everything_ no matter how oily, wet, dirty, etc. and save your butt in the craziest situations, I've used it to stop a boat from sinking and to stop a leak spraying everywhere. You can use it for everything from a leaky roof to a leaky sink to a pipe spraying wildly. Keep in mind, as it is a petroleum product it needs to be around 5-10C (40-50F) to be flexible and sticky enough. (You can also use this in the opposite way in your favor, use ice cubes to cool it down to make it less of a sticky mess.)
Anyone else have any other favorite bitumen products or related things that I'm missing?
Patroleum products were used by indigenous peoples around the world. Going back in time would be pretty wild -- you could just walk around the Dakotas and pick up nuggets of gold; in otherwise pristine environments, you'd find waterways contaminated by oil seeps. Northern indigenous peoples found uses for the oil, but not the gold.
Interesting, bitumen was the first (and only) thing I thought of.
Bitumen is a crude oil product, and quite nasty material indeed. But it's not really what I was referring to here.
Plastic is very durable but it's quite brittle. A plastic bucket for example can break quite easily and needs to be disposed of responsibly or it'll stay around forever ruining the environment.
Depending on the exact chemical reaction makeup these could very well be considered plastics.
Plastics date back around 3500 years with the earliest plastics being made form egg proteins and other animal sources, Shellac which can and is formed into plastic materials has been used for at least 3000 years and in Middle Ages Europe plastics were made by treating horns and making translucent and transparent plastics form them:
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/queenslib.wordpress.com/2017/...
One of the first modern plastics was cellulose nitrate which was used as an ivory replacement and was made by dissolving cotton in nitric acid and mixing it with vegetable oil, the solution can then be poured into molds to create the final shape or made into billets that could be machined or carved.
"The invention enjoyed a brief popularity, but the Hyatt balls were extremely flammable, and sometimes portions of the outer shell would explode upon impact. An owner of a billiard saloon in Colorado wrote to Hyatt about the explosive tendencies, saying that he did not mind very much personally but for the fact that every man in his saloon immediately pulled a gun at the sound."
It just isn't made with a petrochemical.
Linseed oil is awesome stuff though. Currently working on some wooden skis, some with woven flax instead of fiberglass and some with linseed varnish & pine tar bases.
How would you describe them except 'plastic'?
> They can be used instead of plastic in many applications but they're still renewable and bio-degradable materials.
Many plastics are renewable and biodegradable.
I was surprised about the bitumen and its origin story (floating blobs in the dead sea). That stuff looks like bitumen but I did not expect that they had petroleum products so long ago.
I use lots of materials in my craft that were once used by the ancient Egyptians. Beeswax, linseed oil, hide glue, propolis were all used for at least 4000 years successfully. It breaks my heart to know that we abandoned these traditional materials less than a hundred years ago and replaced it with plastic crap, which seems unlikely to stand the test of time.