I should also mention that the Japanese did continue to use and manufacture firearms in limited numbers during the Tokugawa shogunate, but they never advanced beyond matchlock arquebuses and primitive cannon, even though they had access to more advanced technology courtesy of the Dutch trading post at Nagasaki. (Related fun fact: The Japanese were aware that Commodore Perry was en route to Japan in his Black Ships, as the Dutch had told them that he was coming and what would happen if they didn’t co-operate.)
The Japanese regarded firearms as dishonourable peasant weapons, but used them extensively during the Sengoku Jidai for the reasons MarcusF so succintly outlined. After that was over, it was still in everyone’s interest to have a regiment of arquebusiers in service just in case some heavy firepower was needed or someone needed to be reminded who was in charge, but for the most part guns were seen as highly undesireable weapons and a legacy of the time the Foreign Devils were meddling in Japan’s affairs.
This isn’t regression, really; nobody’s *forgotten *how to go to the Moon or build supersonic airliners. We (by which I mean the decision makers) have just chosen not to do so. We could do these things again if we wanted, probably a lot better than before.
The point is that if we don’t (and it doesn’t look like we will anytime soon), we may forget, or at least have to re-discover large parts of the process. This is admittedly unlikely with both these examples, but not outside the realms of possibility if, say, 200 years from now we haven’t build a supersonic jetliner and no-one can remember how Concorde worked.
We know the principles and we can re-engineer it, but I understand that we no longer have a lot of the blueprints and a lot of the specific knowledge needed to run Apollo. This isn’t surprising – who the hell is going to store acrees of four-decades-old obsolete prints? And, if not constantly used, detailed hands-on knowledge of specific cases gets lost, especially when the original engineers and techs die.
Going much further back, there is archaeological evidence that ancient man discovered, discontinued and then re-discovered the use of fire several times in pre-history.
This is a bad example: Hero’s engines served no practical purpose, and the modern (i.e., past couple of centuries) steam engines that are practical bear no resemblence to Hero’s devices. That’s not so much a matter of people forgetting that a steam-powered whirligig is possible, as it is of people just not seeing any reason to bother.
I think there are plenty of examples, but I don’t know that regression was ever uniform across all technologies. Many civilizations had “dark ages”. We tend to focus on Western Europe 400-700 AD. ( I would argue that Rome was regressing well before it was overrun, or maybe that it was overrun well before it fell.) In that case, literacy certainly declined, technologies like concrete, windmills, etc., all disappeared. On the other hand, I believe one of the recent Cecil columns stated that the average life expectancy went up from Roman times to the Middle Ages, bathing was part of city life until close to 1200 AD, IIRC, and the Romans could not have built the Cathedrals.
Byzantium had a dark age in the 700AD - 900AD, during the worst of the Islamic onslaught, and then a recovery that lasted several hundred years. I recall reading in “The History of Civilization” that ancient Israel reached its peak during a dark age in the surrounding region. China has had dark ages. I think the consensus opinion is that “true” civilization (as in meeting various technical criteria) disappeared from large areas of North America, after the introduction of diseases by Europeans wiped out large percentages of the population. Tasmania was referenced in [it] Guns, …[\it] as an example of the idea that a human population has to be a certain size to maintain any given level of technological prowess.
I recall reading about another example; I read that the assembly line was invented in ancient Rome, ( water powered via aqueduct ). The technology never won wide adoption and was forgotten until re-invented in modern times.
Another example in theme with the loss of how to make Greek Fire and Roman concrete; spinning projectiles to make them travel farther and straighter. The Stone Age “Iceman” found in the Alps had arrows with triple feathered shafts designed to spin the arrow in flight. A principle not rediscovered until modern times.
Are you sure it was Tasmania ? I don’t have a copy at hand.
And by “tiny”, I meant “apparently about as small as a society can be and survive in isolation”; unlike those even smaller populations you mention.
There are a lot of specific technologies like that that were trade secrets and still unreplicatable - Chartres blue, the color in the Chartres stained glass windows, is one of them IIRC.
I think you are probably right. It was my understanding that they were disapproved of because they might interfere with the institution of slavery.
And regardless of why; they didn’t pursue it. If they’d fiddled and experimented with the basic idea, they might well have come up with more efficient versions of steam engines.
It’s not that they would have interfered with the institution of slavery–it’s that the institution of slavery made labor-saving devices pretty worthless: they’d have to be very cheap and very efficient before they were a better deal than buying more slaves, and that didn’t seem likely.
I have to disagree with msot of the ideas presented here, because generally the technologies weren’t “lost”. in anyway. Only a very few were actually “lost”. But many other times, economic disintegration or lack of marketability made technologies useless. But they got picked up again as
Concrete probably does count, but virtually nothing else was actually lost. Rather, the economic ability to use it went away with Rome, as well as the cultural basis or interest in it, and technology advanced considerably during the “Dark Ages”. I can’t quite say that Japanese firearms make it, nor Chinese shipbuilding because it wasn’t a radical change from previous designs.
To the slave-owning class of antiquity, slaves were, by definition, not expensive to keep. If the expense of keeping them exceeded the benefit of keeping them, it was apparently pretty routine to abandon them. And slave murders were not common in the ancient world by any account I’ve ever read.
But we aren’t comparing slaves to steam engines: we are comparing slaves to a ball being rotated by a jet of steam. It takes a lot of imagination to look at that and say “You know, in time, that could be more efficient that sending wave after wave of my own men at the problem”.
Interesting points brought up by responses so far: most replies have been about specific technological losses, not tech levels in general. Would those who’ve replied so far say that their examples are indications of an overall reduction? If so, which?
Also, would any of these be proper precedent for a modern reduction on the level of the one that I mentioned in my OP?
Overall reductions would be extremely rare in a pre-globalization world. The reason the hypothetical oil crunch would cause such a widespread regression is the interconnectedness of the modern world, which only started to really appear with the colonial empires of the 18th century.
I’d suggest, though, that losses in Roman technology are of comparable scale. The Roman Empire was fairly well connected within its own sphere of influence, and the erosion of that empire caused a pretty widespread regression in areas noted above - mostly engineering and chemistry.
The Tasmanians were of a comfortably high number to maintain themselves, but may have been isolated as long as tens of thousands of years - if a technology was ever lost there it could not be recovered through trade with others, or by following their example.
That claim is impossible to prove or falsify. While we have metric shitload of ancient arrowheads, we have only handful of shafts and almost none feathers found in archaeological site. For example, we have only ONE whole longbow arrow from XVI century. None from before and then none for two or three hundred years. No way to infer if feathers were slanted or straight. Actually, what we have would suggest rather slightly slanted (and hence spinning projectiles). Also spear throwing techniques might suggest that they were thrown to spin in-flight. We probably wouldn’t know for sure ever.