The cruel criminal law of history “branding” came from the common tool of housewives!
The iron was originally invented not for ironing clothes, but for torturing people. It can be said that the iron was originally a cruel instrument of torture – the torture of branding.
! Ironing
The iron was used to make the ironing machine a cruel instrument of torture.
There are two general ways of branding: the first, the prisoner walks barefoot in the red-hot horizontal iron, the following is a blazing fire, the prisoner if he walks from one end to the other that will spare his life, but most people are difficult to endure the burning heat of the soles of the feet, an inattentive will fall down. The second, the prisoner directly tied to a vertical red-hot iron, chest against the pillar, slowly tortured to death.
! Film and television image: Daji
But either method is horrific and heinous. The prisoner would not be relieved immediately and would often end up dying from the torture, while King Zhou and Daji, sitting on the deer stand, would often laugh and watch the prisoner slowly die.
There is another story about the origin of the torture by cannoning.
King Zhou and Daji were out in the forest when a tree was struck by lightning and burning after a rain shower, but strangely enough, there were many ants leading from one end of the tree to the other, and the ants, unable to stand the heat, fell from the tree into the fire. When Daji heard the prisoner’s screams, she laughed as if she had heard music to stimulate her senses. King Zhou abused the torture to get a laugh from Daji.
However, this punishment was only widely used during the Shang dynasty, and was not used by any of the later dynasties.
Based on the principle of branding, the ancients also created a tool that people often use in their daily lives – the iron.
! Gun branding
The initial use of the iron was probably in the Han Dynasty, when it was filled with boiling water in the iron, with the temperature of boiling water to iron clothes, this is called: water iron, is the use of boiling hot water temperature heat transfer, the wrinkled clothes ironing. Early material is relatively simple, with more ceramics. After entering the metal age, the iron with copper, iron, aluminum material filled with water more.
But the biggest problem with water irons is that the temperature sometimes does not meet the requirements, but the water is easy to cold, and then it was changed to use charcoal is: charcoal iron. This charcoal iron in the Han Dynasty should have been, in the Qing Dynasty before the iron is almost all charcoal iron, this charcoal iron in the remote rural areas can now be seen.
The red charcoal will be placed in the iron, and then used to iron clothes after the bottom of the iron is hot, but that is the iron without a lid, sparks sometimes also splashed on the clothes, burn their clothes.
Iron
Europeans also face the same problem, since the 17th century, they use a heavy “flat iron” in the fire or hot metal plate heated after ironing clothes, but this ironing is easy to make the iron too hot instead of botched, hurt themselves.
The ancient Chinese iron was invented more than 1600 years earlier than the foreign iron, and was the first country in the world to invent and use the iron, and this is the evidence.