Helioforge: DIY Self-Replicating Solar Forge
The Helioforge project is an open source effort to create accessible designs for self-replicating solar kilns and hydrogen crackers that utilize readily available resources. Our goal is to produce a entire catalog of open source devices and designs for DIY self-replicable solar forges that utilize common materials. If we succeed in our mission, it will be possible to manufacture any number of products at home using ubiquitous materials like sand, sun and water, and/or recycled polymers.
This website hasn’t been updated in quite some time, but the designs are open-source and ready to be picked up and developed further
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On this day, 4 August 1792, radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born near Horsham in Sussex. He was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for contributing to an atheist pamphlet, and soon married Mary, author of Frankenstein. He had a tragic life and died young, but wrote some of the greatest English Romantic poetry, including The Masque of Anarchy, which he penned in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, which ends with this fiery appeal to the working class: “Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number— Shake your chains to earth like dew– Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few.” We have made a podcast episode about the Peterloo massacre with film director Mike Leigh, which includes a clip of actor Maxine Peake reading Shelley’s poem: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/11/07/e15-the-peterloo-massacre-with-mike-leigh/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1180952492089899/?type=3
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On this day, 30 September 1919, compositors and pressmen working at The Daily Sketch newspaper in London refused to print the paper until an editorial criticising an ongoing railway strike was deleted. That same day, another newspaper had its publication delayed by its workers demanding that a government advert appealing to the public to resist the strike be thrown out. However they were persuaded by union leaders to withdraw their demand. Newspaper packers and delivery drivers also tried to delay and sabotage their distribution. Two days later, bosses at the far-right Daily Mail tabloid threatened to close the publication down rather than give in to a complaint from their print workers about their coverage of the railway strike.
Pictured: Daily Mail workers https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1223084404543374/?type=3