Although certain documentaries are warm of trot out ancientaliensor other interference fringe possibility to explain our ancestors ' advance , in truth , we need ground no more far - flung than the fact that cleverness is humanity ’s older timber . Left to our own gadget and allowed to survive without constant fear of end by hunger or furiousness , we devise some startling hooey — even if some of our better cause do n’t outlast our calamities .
Then again , sometimes they do . The Western world ’s forward motion was knocked back centuries by the Dark Ages , but the Greek and popish knowledge it lost — some example of which you ’ll find in these pages — afterward found its way back to the Europe via the Muslim world , where in the lag it had helped spawn a prosperous old age . Conversely , some answer are lost because the relevant dubiousness has n’t yet been asked , or because a better answer shoves it into the ash bin of history .
Bakelitegave agency to well plastics , vacuum thermionic tube are just found anymore outside of guitar amplifier and neon is today fading before LEDs . It ’s enough to make one wonder how our culture will be viewed by future archaeologists , when so much of our information and engineering relies on fragile material and explosive storage .
But , hey , if there ’s anything this list prove , it ’s that you ca n’t keep a unspoilt idea down . That , too , is our species ' story .
10: Greek Fire
In the ancient world , the ultimate expression of fire as a weapon of little terror and ruination was a close - quenchless " napalm " called Greek fire — a nitty-gritty so legendary in its effect that " Game of Thrones " used a fictional adaptation to decisive effect in its own epic ( though fictional ) Battle of the Blackwater .
In truth , the term " Hellenic fire " pops up all through story to key out several ancient and medieval substances merge various elements . Early interlingual rendition used pitch , naphtha or sulfur , while Crusaders subsequently faced Greek firing made with saltpeter and turpentine .
But for the real deal , scholars focus on a certain event that took place in 7th - centuryConstantinople(that ’s advanced Istanbul , in typesetter’s case you do n’t know theThey Might Be Giants song).There , in the class 673 , true Greek fire — petroleum - based , self - lighting and imperviable to water quenching — was said to have been used to devastating effect by convoluted emperor butterfly Constantine IV ’s forces against an assail Arab fleet . source arrogate the Greek ships launch the fire in heap or spat from tubes , possibly powered by Roman pump [ sources : Beschizza , Encyclopedia Britannica , National Geographic Channel ] .
Some have argued that the genuine Hellenic fire , excogitate by Callinicus of Heliopolis , a Jewish refugee from Syria , was already lose by then , and that the Constantinople formula was a weak caricature [ source : Beschizza ] . Oh , well — that ’s the trouble with take state secrets to your tomb . Although we think we know Grecian flack ’s basic fixings , the method acting of set the stuff together stay a mystery story — a admonisher that , as with interpersonal chemistry and baking , knowing the recipe is not always enough [ author : Encyclopedia Britannica , National Geographic Channel ] .
9: The Power of Steam
In the Tom Stoppard play " Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , " dimwitted Rosencrantz repeatedly stumbles onto notable scientific and technical discoveries , often via toys ( neither he nor Guildenstern savvy what he ’s done ) . These droll scene raise a thorny question : Do you have to recognise a thing ’s operational principle to lay claim to discover it ? Should we credit the inventor of a steam - push toy with the discovery of steam index ?
Whatever your resolution , there ’s no question that theaeolipile , a plaything excogitate in the first C by artificer Heron of Alexandria , was asteam turbine — a gimmick that turn the thermic muscularity of escapingsteaminto mechanically skillful energy . As far as we know , Heron ’s twist — a water - fed arena , mounted on its axis vertebra above a passion source , that spun thanks to steam escaping from two bent tubes sticking out from its eye — never reach more than entertainment status . But the idea that inventors would get to re - analyze in the 17th 100 , and that would drive theIndustrial Revolutionduring the former 18th and early nineteenth centuries , was there — no matter of whether anyone in Heron ’s time grok why it work on [ sources : Encyclopedia Britannica , Martin , Palermo ] .
Interestingly , Heron himself gather up ancient knowledge , so as some of his kit and boodle were lost — some briefly , some everlastingly — so too were stockpiles of ancient Babylonian , Egyptian , Greek , and papistic maths and engineering forward motion [ generator : Encyclopedia Britannica ] .
8: Indirect Heating
Heron was not alone taking joy in vaporous water . A Greek endure in Egypt , he was part of the first - 100 Roman Empire , and the Romans eff their way of life around steam . For one thing , they used steam in their public bathroom — facility so central to Roman high society that some saw the bath as the symbolisation of Rome itself ( the Baths of Caracalla brood more area than St. Paul ’s Cathedral and could handle 1,600 people at a go ) [ seed : Suddath ] .
No bare watery tubs , various bathing tub complex have outdoor sports domain , food stands , servants , dressing rooms , cold rooms , warm suite and , of course , a steamy Caldarium . Making this sauna - like room possible was an innovational technology forebode the hypocaust — which also pass to be one of the first examples of collateral heat [ seed : PBS ] .
For most of human history ( and prehistoric culture ) , we were stuck with verbatim heat from fire , hearth and , afterwards , stoves . Today , our homes useindirect heat , in which oestrus Energy Department from a central reservoir flows through the house via air , steam or water supply .
The Romans ' hypocaust involve a brute - force version , which channelise fire - heated steam through passages beneath floors and privileged wall , but it worked [ origin : PBS ] . After Rome ’s flop , Europe mostly returned to its pits and hearth for heat . Central heatingwould not re - introduce the Western earth in earnest until the late 18th and other 19th 100 , driven in part by the advances of the Industrial Revolution but slacken by breathing government issue , fire and explosion risk , arguments between architects and engineers , and the need to convert homeowners to convert from try - and - true heating methods [ source : Bruegmann ] .
Through their bathroom and other plumbery overture , the Romans spread hygiene throughout their imperium — although , as we ’ll see in the next incision , not as effectively as they might have hoped .
7: Plumbing
get together the Roman Empire , even at the point of a sword , brought with it sure perks . No question , the Romans were groundbreaking engineers , and they often work that hotshot to the art of moving , stash away and utilize water supply . Via aqueducts , underground passage and water tank , they conveyed water over immense distances , irrigate William Claude Dukenfield , fed fountains and , in a sentiency , flush their toilets .
When not using the W.C. at home , Romans did their concern using large public latrine , in full persuasion of one another . Within them , beneath rows of marble throne , channels of run water cross waste into the sewers . But because the Romans lacked both potty report and a possibility ofbacteria , all was not affluent with success . In fact , Roman latrines and bath continue sign of many of the diseases andparasitesthat their hygienics methods ought to have washed away . One account : After " bombing at the forum , " the Romans pass around a shared sponge on a stick to clean their " Appian means " — not the most hygienic alternative . But it ’s also potential that they did n’t change their baths ' water often enough , and that the dark filth ( human poop ) with which they fertilized their crops might have brought parasites back in via the food supply [ author : Beck , Smithsonian , Suddath , Wenz ] .
The Romans did n’t invent plumbing , nor did it disappear when Rome come down . Rather , through them it reach an vertex to which , after Rome ’s gloam , Europe would not draw near for another millennium [ reservoir : Suddath ] .
6: Damascus Steel
It ’s an old tarradiddle : You ’re hanging out with your blacksmith , metallurgist and artillery - enthusiast friends and you ’ve run out of thing to contend about . certainly enough , someone bring up the legendary metal weapons once deal in medieval Damascus , famed for their supposedly irreproducible strength , border and undulation approach pattern . One friend forge on about how " damascened"steelis no lost secret metallic element or technique , but merely a method of billet welding , in which dissimilar alloy are fused , drawn and fold up to create a undulation pattern . Another defends to the hilt the opinion that these fabled blades were truly unique .
So who ’s right ? Well , although we can make blades today that rivalDamascus steelweapons , few would argufy that their plasticity , strong suit and lancinate edge were amazing for their 24-hour interval . Nor has anyone yet made blades with quite the same characteristics as the originals , even when part with the same carbonized brand that the weapon master of Damascus likely used [ generator : Verhoeven et al . ,Wadsworth and Sherby ] .
The method acting for making Damascus steel blades was a nearly guard secret , like much of the armourer ’s artistry , and was turn a loss when patronage in the blade conk out in the late eighteenth 100 . One theory holds that the art snuff it when its source of iron in southern India , which perhaps produced ore peppered with cardinal impurities like tungsten and vanadium , bug out . Blacksmiths ' legendary quenching liquids , bruit to range from pee to the bodies of hard worker , long provided another potential account for the arm ' long suit and edge - holding qualities . Today ’s theories , however , favour lost techniques of thermal cycling or low - temperature metalworking [ source : Sullivan , Verhoeven et al . ,Wadsworth and Sherby ] .
Either path , you could have damascene brand , but Damascus steel blades may well be unique items , like Stradivarius fiddle . And no one will ever crack that mystery … right ?
5: Stradivarius Violins
Does it change our view of a lost art when we ’ve learned the trick to how it was done ? If we could , as is suggested in the picture show " Head Office , " mass - produce violin that look , sound and smell like Stradivari ’s famous instrument , would we stop valuing the originals ?
We doubt it . In fact , understanding , as we now do , how Antonio Stradivari brought the violin to its highest form at the spell of the eighteenth C only elevates our respect for the feat . For Stradivari ’s contributions extend far beyond the unusual woods or special varnish to which many credit his instruments ' stellar sound ; they comprehend the organic evolution of the fiddle itself . Stradivari helped to work out the violin ’s ideal shape and size , from designing a fresh bridge to stretching the body and making it shallower [ sources : Encyclopedia Britannica , Encyclopedia Smithsonian ] .
It ’s true that the secrets of Stradivari ’s store in Cremona , Italy — which also made cellos , guitars , harps and violas — have been lost for more than 250 years and that modern assimilator have yet to give away the secret of his varnish [ rootage : Encyclopedia Britannica , Encyclopedia Smithsonian ] . But it ’s also reliable that expert no longer consider the chemical in the varnish — intended to protect the wood from worms — to be the solo contender for explain the violins ' evocative sound . Modern analysis suggests a portmanteau of first - chair contenders , including a careful proportion of stuff thicknesses in the top and back plates , the placement of tiny stomate in the Mrs. Henry Wood and some as - yet unnamed chemical substance treatments [ sources : Conner , RSNA , Texas A&M University ] .
4: A Medieval MRSA Remedy
It ’s been said that there ’s a fine ancestry betweenfolk remedyand medicine , but we would argue that the line is in fact quite broad , and it ’s fix by a simple question : What can be scientifically proven to work ? Unfortunately , that proof can take 100 , even millennium , to move beyond bare anecdote . Hippocrates advised annoyance and swell up sufferers in the fifth century BCE to chew willow bark , but it was n’t until fairly recently that we acquire not only that it worked , but why — namely , that white willow contains salicin , a skinny chemical cousin toaspirin(acetylsalicylic acid ) [ reference : Ehrlich ] .
tight forwards to 2015 , when an old English recipe for an eye salve began make tidings for its promise as a weapon against methicillin - resistant Staphylococcus aureus , akaMRSA , the obstinate flagellum of infirmary and nursing homes . The brewage , which contain garlic , onion or Allium porrum , wine-coloured and moo-cow gall , was described 1,000 year ago in " Bald ’s Leechbook , " an Anglo - Saxon collecting of remedies now put up in the British Library . Remarkably , when researcher concocted the cure , it not only affected MRSA — it eradicated it [ sources : BBC , Rayner ] .
Some bookman consider that the early medico who contributed to the book used a proto - scientific trial - and - misplay method and kept careful annotation on which variety work and which ones failed . Unfortunately , the MRSA killer had to expend a millennium forgotten among dubious tonics before its value was found again [ sources : BBC , Rayner ] .
3: Advanced Gear-based Calculation (the Antikythera Mechanism)
In a sentience , this applied science was lose twice : First , when the ship that carry it sank two millennia ago and , second , when historiographer , unmoved by hard - to - readX - raysof the day , leave it to languish for more than a century after it was brought back to the airfoil in 1900 - 1901 .
It was worth the wait . Once scholars sussed out what this laptop - sized aim was — a gearing - free-base car for right modelling the movement of the planet , moon and Dominicus — it change the way we imagine of Greek geartrain engineering , to say nothing of the precision of numerical calculation the gadget implied . It ’s all there in the gears : For example , one gear ’s 235 teeth match the number of months in 19 solar years ( the little time in which solar and lunar cycles describe up ) . The inventor might have inherited this estimate from the ancientMesopotamians , who used the 235 - month cycle and make up great table that tracked the sky ’s movements with noteworthy accuracy . Other gears and ratio track lunar move , even taking into account check because of the moon ’s elliptical domain [ sources : Marchant , PBS , University of Puget Sound ] .
Since the decipherment of the so - calledAntikythera chemical mechanism , some have quibble over whether a planetarium qualifies as a reckoner , but it perform calculations that unwrap wheneclipseswill occur , down to the hr — decades in progression . Lunar cycles were vital to the Greeks , who swear on them to bike farming pattern , time religious festivals , schedule payments and plot tactical advantages [ sources : Marchant , PBS , University of Puget Sound ] .
Europe would have to hold back until 1642 before an in effect , geared mechanically skillful figurer , the Pascaline , would be invented by Gallic mathematician , inventor and philosopherBlaise Pascal . Cousin devices to the Antikythera Mechanism may have range up here and there in the medieval world , but true astronomical clocks would not reappear in Europe until the fourteenth hundred [ source : Marchant ] .
2: Calculus
Practically speaking , you’re able to execute a surprising amount using only geometry , basicmathematicsand a few choice rules of thumb . Eventually , though , the need to calculate tricksy matters — pace of change , curvatures , areas under curve — demand that you develop mathematics that can plow them . This is where calculus comes in .
Today , we credit its development to bothIsaac Newtonand Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , both of whom developed it independently around the tour of the eighteenth century , but in truth the world ’s intellects had been flirting with the idea for millennia . Let ’s set out by return briefly to the ancient Greeks . In their numerical flower , they producedEudoxus(c . 408 - 355 BC ) , whose method acting of debilitation butt against the right way up to the notion of the boundary , and Archimedes ( c. 287 - 212 BC ) , who amount up with practical method acting of reckoning that bore a family resemblance to entire calculus . Exhaustion would afterwards spring from the mind of fifth - one C Chinese mathematician Liu Hui , too , and similarly significant strides were taken among knightly Indian thinker [ sources : Boyer , SLU ]
These forerunners to calculus , like so many cash advance from ancientness that were lost with the gloam of Rome , hint at the noesis that was lose to Europe when it accede the Dark Ages . But as ideas , they also go solicit in their own time because their potential was never fully realized [ sources : Boyer , SLU ] .
1: The New World
The first masses todiscoverthe New World did not then lose it — they mystify around for the yummy mammoth meat they ’d followed across the Bering domain bridge . But depending on which research you read ( and consider ) , you might be blow out of the water by the roster of visitors who allegedly came and went after .
Every schoolchild sleep with the narration of the Norse Explorer who sailed to Greenland and Iceland at the number of the eleventh century . Speculation that such sailors made it to Newfoundland during that century is bear out by the remains of the L’Anse aux Meadows resolution and the tales of bothVikingsand autochthonal peoples .
But Columbus ’s line of precursors did n’t end with a Norse expedition from Greenland , at least not if you believe some ( admittedly shaky ) surmisal . According to one well - known ( and largely debunk ) book , Chinese sailors trounce Columbus to the New World by 71 years [ generator : Finlay ] . Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has give voice to the fringe view that Muslims adjoin Latin American civilizations three hundred before the Italian adventurer first set canvass [ source : Tharoor ] .
A bit more mainstream are those who argue that Malayo-Polynesian might have get through South America before any European stepped foot in the Americas . Although some potential proof of the conjecture has been dealt a few blows of late , the Polynesians were prodigious sailor boy and settlers ; when compare to their other title , such a feat certainly does not seem beyond their abilities [ source : Smith ] .
Whatever the lawsuit , we know at least one chemical group after the Bering Strait migrator found the Americas long before Columbus and did n’t stick around for long . The New World might seem like a rather large affair to forget ( actually , they immortalise the discovery in their saga ) , but the Vikings belike received some boost on their way out — from the fierce descendants of the first migrants [ source : Parks Canada ] .
Lots More Information
It ’s unfortunate that so many of these example came from the Western world . This is a consequence not of a lack of great inventions from the sleep of the world — quite the opposite , in fact . Rather , because of such a persistence of civilisation and preserved culture in places like China and India , it was difficult to find model of answers that had actually been lost — although those who value ethnical antiquities might argue that such is happing today in China . In places where it did happen , tragically — I ’m conceive here of the despoiling effect of the African hard worker craft or the post - Columbian loss of so much Native American material culture — it is no easy labor to find readable accounts of what on the dot was suffer .
To terminate on a more positive note , human minds are inexhaustibly fecund and somehow recover a means to inventively solve persistent problems , whether that means reinventing the wheel or rendering it disused . So long as we can bend that resourcefulness away from destruction , we as a species can keep to build up .
