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History’s Most Catastrophic Man-made Errors

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 34 min

Wanggongchang Explosion - Beijing — The Wanggongchang Explosion devastated Beijing. Pintrest

10. The Great Leap Forward’s DIY Home Steel Furnaces

Propaganda poster extolling the production of steel during The Great Leap Forward. Pinterest

A hallmark of the Great Leap Forward was Mao’s brainstorming about increasing steel production, a benchmark of industrialization. Mao figured that China did not need to wait for the development of infrastructures such as steel plants, or the training of a skilled workforce.

Instead, the intrepid Chinese could produce steel by using blast furnaces in the back of their communes – literal do-it-yourself backyard furnaces. People used whatever fuel they could get their hands on to power the furnaces, from coal to wooden furniture to the wood of coffins. When they lacked iron ore, they melted whatever steel objects they could find to produce steel girders. The results were less than what Mao had hoped.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.