About Greek Fire-isn’t it so much that they don’t know the exact measurments? Because I remember reading in one of my text books that they still know the ingredients.
Would it benefit anyone today?
This brings to mind other media. You can still find places that can deal with 21 track tapes, but analog tapes are all but lost to us now. I’m sure you can think of other orphaned media whose mother devices have all but disappeared.
While not exactly the same thing, think of 1920s films that you’ve seen, where everybody’s moving around all hinky-jinky. They didn’t look like that when they first appeared - they were recorded and played back at 24 frames per second, and appeared normally paced. But if you see them today they’re probably being played back on a modern 30 frame per second device.
Scientists still don’t know exactly how the ancient Egyptians built the huge pyramids without cranes/etc. They know they had slaves, and they also have theories about how they used ramps and so forth to move the blocks, but it still seems hardly possible even under ideal conditions.
Cite? I ask because I’ve got friends in the recording industry and they still use analog for recording things like drums and bass, since they don’t like the sound that digitally recorded masters of drums and bass have. IIRC, there’s even a gentleman who built a massive recording studio a few years ago in New Orleans that’s all analog.
Thanks for the info, people. I find the spectacle of astronomy buffs painstakingly grinding their own lenses to be reassuring, somehow. Don’t forget the Leonid meteor shower tonight! [best times: 11 PM and 5 AM, American E.S.T.]
Another tech-gadget-in-distress: the turntable/cartridge/needle combo. When I briefly clerked in a music store in the '80’s, we sold needles with the aid of a catalogue that listed thousands of them – most very obscure, as only a hundred or so different cartridges accounted for about 95% of the market. Granted, turnabulists [sp?] are a market for 'tables in their own right, and audiophiles and music completists cherish vinyl for their own reasons, but come on! If your turntable is vintage or was not a big-seller, you may find it impossible to find new cartridges for it, at any price. And your turntable may work for many years beyond the useful life of your last needle… 
Actually, that may not be the case. I’ve heard that turntables out sell single disk CD players by a wide margin. I’d be surprised if there weren’t specialty needle makers out there, since everyone at one time thought that tubes were dead, but audiophiles simply refuse to let them go. (And thankfully, the Russians never developed IC technology, so there’s plenty of tubes being made today.)
Never underestimate the ability of huge masses of motivated labor and lots of cold, hard, cash. In truth, though we simply aren’t sure in what way the Egyptions went about it. We do know about a dozen ways to accomplish it with their resource and materials. They simply didn’t write the process down.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of times when they say we “can’t” do something today, its because there’s simply no need for us to do that. I’m reminded of a book which claimed that giant stone balls in South America are smoother than anything we could make today. Well, yeah, because we don’t have any need to make giant, smooth stone balls today. If we suddenly decided that we needed to do that, we could. We probably wouldn’t make them the same way the ancients did, but we could make 'em.
Sorry, pal, but I’m going to have to turn it back on you. Of course I don’t have a cite for the absence of analog-to-digital transcribers - that’s like proving a negative. Do you really know people who have and currently operate analog recording equipment? Who are they?
I work in a BIG public library and I used to be responsible for the 680 section of the collection, which I always called “screwball technology”. There were books on how to repair your jacquard loom, how to be a wheelwright, how to fix a Conestoga wagon, stuff like that. Some books covered processes and technologies that I had no idea what they were about.
Presumably if any technology is lost, it is either ancient, or some sort of computer technology from the recent past.
Well, the recording studio I mentioned was discussed on NPR some time back, don’t remember when, but it couldn’t have been more than five years ago, though. If you’d like the e-mail address of my buddy who works in the recording industry, I’ll be happy to send it to you. Sadly, the DDD/ADD/AAD notations on CDs has gone out of style, so I can’t point you to a recent CD that has an ADD notation indicating that the original recording (or at least parts of it) were analog. Nor do I have any recent CDs with liner notes that indicate this that I could point you to (mainly because I haven’t bought any in the past 12 months or so, and I’ve had to sell off most of my collection).
However, given that record labels are constantly releasing old recordings that have never been on CD before (or greatly improved releases of old versions) I’d say that there’s plenty of analog to digital conversion going on out there. Rhino records is a great source for old analog blues recordings being put onto CD for the first time. (The new DVD-audio CDs and the other “superior” CD format [forget the name for it], all are made using the original analog masters as their source material.)
If you want to talk about technology we no longer have the infrastructure to make, there are lots of those. Starting with a rocket that can go to the moon. Or certain vacuum tubes. I imagine some of the earliest IC manufacturing stuff is all gone now.
But I thought the question was more of “what things did we used to know that we no longer know?” What is truly gone? Because obviously, we could build a moon rocket or an old IC chip plant for nostalgia purposes if we really wanted to. Maybe that’ll be the big fad in 500 years - people will own restored factories like people own restored cars now. Just for nostalgia. They’ll have big parties where people will drink and watch someone extrude polyvinylchloride. That’s SO 2000’s, man.
Sam, didn’t we preserve the schematics for all Apollo craft? Don’t we have large examples of the technology on display in the Smithsonian? Sure, everyone originally involved is retired and/or dead, but the knowledge is certainly there, unless I’m very much mistaken.
I’m sure NASA is just as capable of reproducing the full Apollo 11 mission, complete with moonshot, as Ford is of replicating the Model T, or IBM the System/360. Or are we really that bad at keeping records?
Sam, ignore my post. I read information' for infrastructure.’ Of course, we no longer have the massive Apollo 11 plants left…
:smack:
Reread what Sam said. We haven’t lost the technology, merely the infrastructure. The plans for the Saturn V are still extant, and there’s a couple of them lying around as displays (notably at Cape Kennedy), but we don’t have the facilities to make them any more. If we suddenly decided (and how I wish we would) that we had to put a man on the Moon in a few years, we could do it, fairly easily. We just don’t have the assembly line going like we did during Apollo.
Tuckerfan: Read my next post in sequence. I even used smackie…
Notice the time stamp, practically a simulpost.
You had two minutes, ya hoser…
35mm cine is 24 frames per second so tht doesn’t hold. Early cine cameras were hand cranked and that inconsistency and possibly lower average frame rate accounts for the look. TV is 30 fps (actually 29.97 for NTSC color) but that has nothing to do with cine transfers to video.
Two words: dialup connection.