I think it was called “Secrets of the Ancients” or something like that. It was a fascinating BBC series.
Captain Amazing That reference to Australian aborigines losing the technology for bows and arrows intrigues me. I know that Jared Diamond states it in “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” but I’ve also heard that they simply never had bows and arrows.
Diamond’s reason why the technology disappeared always struck me as a bit lame- from memory he said that they stopped using them when they had killed off all the easy game. Do you know of any other cites for this claim?
Diamond also made a case study of guns in Japan. Guns were introduced into Japan in 1543 by the Portugese. Within 100 years Japan had more guns per capita than any other country on earth. However the Samurai (rightly) saw them as a threat to their power and suppressed them so that when Commodore Perry arrived in the 1840s both the guns and the technology that made them had completely disappeared.
There’s an article by Diamond here that also discusses a range of technologies lost by the isolated Tasmanian aboriginal community- such as the ability to make fire from scratch, bone tools. Further he states that:
It wasn’t that they couldn’t build it, they instead found that the plane itself was nearly impossible to fly because it is extremely unstable by design.
At least 2 groups that I know of are trying to build a replica for the 100th anniversary next December. Hopefully with lots of practice with simulators the people that they find to fly the craft will be able to keep it in the air like Wilbur was.
Well, I didn’t easily find much in the way of definitive sources, but I seem to recall that the Nazis had a method of artificially synthesizing oil that didn’t survive WWII. UL or not?
As others have pointed out, though, many technologies have become just plain obsolete and skills in them are no longer needed. The more intriguing scenario, of course, involves the possibly vital technology that once was ours, but has passed from our grasp.
Well, for that, you can always join the crowds of folks who claim that Tesla had lots and lots of super hi-tech stuff that got lost when he died. There’s also just about every free energy site out there claiming that this or that departed inventor had it all worked out, but died before he could realize his greatest dream.
That’s possible, but the odds of that has happened is very slim. The main reason is there are more scientists and engineers than there ever has been. A lot of teams race against each other to make discoveries and inventions.
Even back in the days of Darwin, Wallace almost beat him to discovering evolution. Some said Wallace did beat good old Charlie.
I think you’re refering to a method used to produce a gasoline-like fuel from natural gas. “White gas” maybe?
I don’t remember much, but I heard about it a few years ago as a possible means of transporting natural gas from the North Slope. It had high energy overhead, something like 30% of gas would be consumed in the conversion alone, even before transport.
The Chinese were in a position where they had a good thing going (for the leaders) and didn’t want or need to rock the boat.
[ul]
[li]They have always had a very regimented, complex, structured government and society. In the Imperial Age, there was no vertical mobility of any kind and horizontal mobility was scarce to impossible. New technologies would have done to China what they did to Europe: Created new social classes and disrupted what the Chinese Emperors needed to stay in power.[/li][li]They had no constant fights over resources or religion. Unlike Europe, China was one big homogenous region with no great political or religious rifts. Furthermore, China’s leadership was built on a Hydraulic Monarcy: Massive public works projects were needed to irrigate farmland, creating a bureaucratic system to administer them and centralizing power in the hands of those who controlled the irrigation ditches. If nobody can get uppity enough to challenge the High Mandarin, there are no arms races and new technologies simply aren’t developed.[/li][/ul]
Oh, a lot of those supposedly lost technologies like blacksmithing, and so forth aren’t lost, they are just rare, having no utility. I know of several local armorers, weaponsmiths, and general blacksmiths.
Actually, I’d say that jjimm was probably talking about a hydraulic ram, which uses the momentum of a relatively large amount of moving water to pump a relatively small amount of water uphill.
Oddly enough the sercret to Damascus steel has been recovered. The actual secret was unkown to those who made the original. The strength came from way specific impurities such as vanadium reacted to the forging process. The ingots, called wootz cakes, came from India. When the source changed the composition changed and no one knew why. A modern knifemaker and metalurgist did destructive testing of some original Damascus blades and through some experimentation were able to recreate the preocess.
FWIW Damascus steel is not laminated as are Samurai swords. The surface patterns looks very similar but are an artifact of the forging process on the impurities.
They did explore and implement ways to “crack” high and medium-volatile bituminous hard coal to create petroleum, IIRC. Could that be what you are thinking of?
Or Antonio Meucci, who had a working model before either of them, but couldn’t come up with the money to file a patent. His heirs claimed that Bell and Meucci once shared a lab, and Bell stole the design from Meucci. Of course, no one person invented the telephone. It was a combination of technologies that already existed for the most part, and Bell, Gray, and Meucci managed to put them together in the right way.
Use your time machine to shoot all three of them, and I’ll bet the telephone still gets invented in the same era. It was an idea whose time had come.
Hand-grinding lenses, in the manner of Anton Van Leewenhoek (the Dutch inventor of the microscope), perhaps? Although a certain crafted aspect survives in the creation of one-of-a-kind superlenses for the Hubble Telescope and its like.
Also, slide rulers, mimeograph machines, IBM punchcard systems, and Chinese typewriters (with their massive trays holding hundreds of character tiles) are all falling into history’s tech dustbin. Not that they couldn’t be revived in a pinch, I suppose… but I can’t imagine the circumstances.
Does anybody know from personal observation if the abacus has fallen out of use in Asian commercial establishments?
I wonder if, outside certain rubber-producing developing nations, if any industry still uses natural rubber – vulcanized or unvulcanized.
In the medical field, there’s a pressing need for today’s physicians to be able to readily recognize smallpox, bubonic plague, etc. and to immediately alert the proper authorities. Those are diagnoses that no early-Renaissance-era physic would have had difficulty with.
Scrivener: I own a slide rule and a manual, and I’ve used it a few times (it’s a circular model, so maybe not what you’re thinking of). Slide rules aren’t going to die like Greek fire died, but they’re already obsolete and rather hard to find.
As for punch cards, well, I don’t know. The basic technology behind punch cards is not going anywhere, but certain formats used by specific models of specific punch card-driven machines may already have been more or less lost to time. Depending on the generation of the machine and the longevity of the corporation producing it, specific punch cards may or may not be readable with current knowledge. For example, EBCDIC isn’t going anywhere, despite the fact the rest of the world has chosen ASCII (in various incarnations, the most recent being Unicode) over this deliberately nonstandard in-house format. Why? `In-house’ was IBM, and people still have to interface with antique IBM mainframes. Similarly, Baudot code has survived far past its prime because certain niches (TDD and Ham radio) still use it. A paper tape program in Baudot could be readable, even if other programs from the same era aren’t.
So, is a technology dead when the fundamentals have been forgotten, or is it dead when useful specifics have to be recreated to fill in the gaps?
