Greek Fire
Now Greek Fire, dat was pretty much an old-timey kind of Napalm. It come up out of Greece, but I tell you what, it did some mighty work in the sea fights of the Byzantine Empire. See, dat stuff would float right on top of the water and y'all couldn't put it out with water neither. They kept the secrets of how they made it and used it so close dat we still ain't sure how it worked today. Folks been studyin' on the Formula mostly, but I reckon the storage and the pressurized deliverin' system had a whole lot to do with how it lit off and did its job.
Flexible Glass
Ain't much anybody can prove about dat flexible glass, or ‘vitrium flexile’, dat they say got made back when Tiberius Caesar ran the Roman Empire, but there's some mighty interestin' old stories dat might give it a little credit.
Dem stories tell about a glassmaker who brought a glass vessel (what kind of vessel changes from story to story) to the Emperor, and the Emperor looked it over. He handed it back to the glassmaker, who up and threw it down on the ground. Cool as you please, the glassmaker picked it up and showed the Emperor a dent in the glass instead of a bunch of broken pieces. Then dat Glassmaker hammered it right back to its original shape, and looked like his work never got a scratch on it.
Now y'all would think he'd get a reward for dat, but the Emperor got scared this new material would make gold, silver, and other precious metals worth less. So he made sure nobody else ever learned the formula for ‘vitrium flexile’ and then went and got rid of the poor glassmaker’s head. Lord have mercy.
Seems impossible, but there might be somethin' to dat story after all. Folks reckon if dat Roman glassmaker somehow got hold of boric acid or borax (both of which turn up natural in the earth), what he ended up with would be pretty much “unbreakable”.
Damascus steel
Nowadays folks use dat name for all kinds of pattern welded forged steel products, but way back yonder, Damascus steel was found a long time ago and they made swords out of it in the middle east. Stories say dem swords could cut right through rocks or even shear another blade clean in two, but what made dat steel so special? Nobody's sure exactly how they done it, but wootz steel got brought in from Sri Lanka and they worked it in the forgin' with other metals to “weave” 'em together instead of makin' an alloy. Dat process gave 'em an incredibly strong but flexible metal dat smiths today have been strugglin' to copy. Modern Damascus is generally good quality and mighty pretty, but it's only an approximation of what it used to be, y’all.
Apollo and Gemini Space Program Technology
It ain't truly “lost”, but the Apollo and Gemini space programs leave a lot of modern scientists scratchin' their heads. Hardly any schematics or records got kept of them first programs, on account of the pressure of the space race gettin' worse and worse, so nearly every program got rushed to the finish and brought in private contractors who took whatever records they did have home with 'em when the job was done. That wasn't a problem for several years, but now researchers with not much else to go on have started reverse engineerin' the older components to figure out how in the world they worked as good as they did
Silphium
Dis lost kind of fennel plant got used in Roman times for birth control and as a cure-all for ever' little ailment. It grew only along what's now the coast of modern day Libya. It got to be one of the most valuable things in the ancient world mighty quick, and not only did folks use it all over, they put it on several kinds of their money too.
Folks reckon dat with the plant growin' in only a little bitty piece of the world and the demand gettin' bigger, it most likely got overharvested and run plumb out of existence.
Stradivari Violins
Dem violins and other stringed instruments made by the Stradivari Family were prized in their day, circa 1650-1750, and today they're famous for a sound quality dat can't be matched, y'all, and dat's impossible to recreate. Most of the ones still around are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the experts still argue about what makes 'em sound so pretty. Some reckon it was a fungus dat grew in the region, or maybe the density of the wood, but nobody can say for sure.
The family art was only known by Antonio Stradivari and his sons, Omobono and Francesco. The family secret got lost with 'em when they passed on.
Nepenthe
Dem Greeks were a whole lot more advanced than other civilizations of their time. One thing they were mighty well thought of for was medicine. They say they treated folks in mourning with Nepenthe, an anti-depressant known to “chase away sorrow.” The plant gets mentioned a lot in Greek writin', like Homer’s the Odyssey, so some historians claim it could be made up. Others believe it was real and used all over ancient Greece. They say Nepenthe come from Egypt, and what it did has led a lot of folks to compare it to opium or laudanum as “a drug of forgetfulness.” It’s possible dis plant is still around today, but modern science ain't figured out what its modern equivalent would be, so for now it stays a mystery.
Roman Concrete
Y'all ever notice dat road they fixed last year fallin' apart already? Or maybe dat old crumbly concrete buildin' sittin' there waitin' on demolition? Why is it our modern concrete falls apart inside a century but Roman Concrete has stood more than a millennium? Well, the biggest difference is the chemical makeup.
Roman concrete had a whole lot of volcanic rock and lime in it, and when seawater got in there it set off a reaction between the ingredients and made an incredibly strong bond. Our modern Portland cement don't have dat mixture and only lasts about 50 years, quite often less if it's sittin' in seawater.
And to add insult to injury, looks like the “Roman Method” for makin' concrete is a far sight better for the environment and would put less carbon dioxide in the air every year. Well, the more you know.
Starlite Egg
Maurice Ward invented Starlite in 1986, a special plastic dat could stand over 10,000°C and wouldn't give off toxic gases or smoke. He took the exact formula to his grave, but folks know dis stuff was built on a mix of approximately 21 polymers and copolymers with ceramics added in. They say it got stronger and tougher when you put it under stress, too.
Dis stuff showed up on BBC’s Tomorrows World in 1990, where they coated an egg in it and blasted it with a 1200° torch. Not only Did Starlite protect dat egg, the inside temperature never got above 35°C and the egg was still raw, I tell you what.
Not even High-powered lasers OR simulated nuclear flashes could destroy the stuff, and mighty quick the inventor had investors callin' him up tryin' to cash in on his invention.
Worried dis material would end up in the wrong hands, Mr.Ward was dead set on keepin' a 51% control of the projects and wanted to make sure nobody could reverse engineer Starlite. Ward passed on in 2011 without any agreements bein' made. Starlite may be lost to the world, but Ward said some of his immediate family knew the recipe, so there's always a chance we'll see dis material used big-time down the road.
Mithridate
Mithridatium, named for King Mithridates VI, was supposed to be a “universal antidote” for all poisons. The exact formula got lost to time, but historians reckon it had opium, chopped vipers, and small amounts of both poisons and their antidotes in it. They made dat antidote around 100 B.C. and used it for many a century, especially in Italy and France. They was even still usin' it not long ago in the 19th century under the name “theriac”. Today nobody knows the recipe, but folks have made documented attempts to recreate the formula for dis miracle antidote as recently as the 1990s.
Sloot Coding System
Back in the mid to late 90’s a Dutch electronics engineer come up with a data storage method dat could hold a full length film in 8 kilobytes of data (.008Mb or .000008GB). Most modern ways still need a whole lot more data to store a regular movie, and HD films even more. Even with the “impossibility” of dis system, it drew investors quick, and Jan Sloot, the inventor, showed his system to Roel Pieper from Phillips. Later dat year Pieper left Phillips to join Sloot’s Company.
Sad to say, just days before Sloot was fixin' to release the source code, they found him dead in his garden from what looked like a heart attack.
Tragic as dat was, it wouldn't have stopped the investors from perusing the technology. There was just one little problem… A key piece of the project was kept on a floppy disk in Sloot’s Possession, and after he died they never could recover it. (Despite searchin' for months)
Wilhelm Reich’s Cloudbuster
Back in the 1950’s William Reich made a pseudoscientific contraption he called a “Cloudbuster”. Dis device supposedly worked an energy called “orgone energy” to mess with the atmosphere and change the weather. They say somebody used it on a farm in 1953 and it was proven to work when it called down rain.
My own research has got me believin' dat 1953 event was more than likely just a coincidence, but there's been reports of modern “Cloudbusters” gettin' built with some mighty severe consequences for the individual at least, if not the folks around 'em.
They also used the “orgone energy” to make devices for medicinal use, but the FDA decided it served no medical purpose and more than likely gave a placebo effect, after interviewin' physicians for years. A professor from the University of Oregon told the FDA Inspector interviewin' him dat he knew the device was phony, but he still found it useful on account of his wife would sit in the booth quiet for hours a day. Guess it was good for somethin' after all, ain't it? In March of 1954 the FDA ordered all accumulators, parts and instructions destroyed, and several of Reich’s books dat mentioned orgone energy got held back too.
Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower
Now dat it's 2019, we got some “futuristic” technologies like hoverboards and wireless charging, but wireless energy was dreamed up and tried around the turn of the 20th century by Nikola Tesla, y'all.
Tesla come up with a lot of new inventions, but his biggest dream was wireless power. After he sent energy wirelessly over little short distances in his lab, he was fixin' to try his “World Wireless System”. He started work on his towers in Colorado Springs around 1899-1900 and ran numerous tests to prove and refine his hypothesis.
While a lot of Tesla’s tests were “successful”, looks like confirmation bias had a huge hand in how he did his research, and mighty little got done to rule out any other explanations for his data.
Even without the usual proof of concept, J.P. Morgan himself put in over $150,000 to help Tesla build the Wardenclyffe tower in New York. Mind you, Tesla sold the tower as a radio project to beat Marconi broadcastin' across the Atlantic, rather than just the “wireless energy transmitter” he first planned to make. By 1901, Tesla was livin' large and expectin' great success from his project, but on December 12th, 1901 Marconi got a signal across the Atlantic Ocean and was set in history forever as the father of modern radio.
Naturally, dat ain't what Tesla had promised J.P. Morgan, and so the Tycoon refused to put another dime into the tower. Tesla spent years tryin' to find funding to finish his tower, but as time went on the chances of finishin' got slimmer and slimmer. Dat, among other things, led to Tesla’s later depression and overall decline, leavin' him pretty much homeless and broke at the end of his life.
We'll never know what might have happened if only Tesla’s Investors had done more to help, but goin' by modern electrical engineering and science it looks like Tesla was bound to fail as far as the “World Wireless System” was concerned. Still, his knack for wirelessly powerin' light bulbs and other devices over short distances is somethin' we still can't copy or do in an economic way today. There's always a chance Tesla found some piece of wireless energy dat he took to his grave, but more than likely his not bein' able to properly scale the transmission up to a longer distance is what led to his eventual decline.
Nikola Tesla’s Patent
While Wireless Energy was Tesla’s “Magnum Opus”, he made several other fantastic and useful inventions in his lifetime. From the Brushless AC Motor to actual live demonstrations of wireless energy transfer in his lab, he did it all. But one of his lesser-known patents mentions somethin' dat may look mighty familiar and has exploded in popularity the last few years. Though he never called it a “drone” outright, Tesla thought up Unmanned vehicles and patented the idea for the “method of and apparatus for controlling mechanism of moving vessels or vehicles” in November of 1898. Tesla pictured dis device runnin' on electrical waves, and though he didn't call 'em by name, he was in fact right about usin' radio waves for wireless controls.
Tesla Believed in the destructive potential of unmanned vehicles and said in his patent, “… for by reason of its certain and unlimited destructiveness it will tend to bring about and maintain permanent peace among nations.”
The first “war drone”, Kettering Bug, got made durin' World War 1, but it was unreliable at best and got finished too late to ever see a war zone. The destructive potential Tesla talked about wasn't seen for nearly another century and is only just now bein' used dat way for warfare and peacekeepin'. Turns out a much more terrifyin' and destructive weapon was what it took to keep the superpowers from squabblin' amongst themselves, and it wasn't Tesla’s design. The Manhattan project’s child, The Atomic Bomb.
The Antikythera Mechanism
One of the most puzzlin' artifacts in history is the Antikythera Mechanism, a bronze device dat divers found off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in the early 1900s. The machine's made up of over 30 gears, cranks, and dials dat you could work to chart the astronomical positions of the sun, moon, and other planets. They've dated the device as far back as the first or second century BC. Nobody knows the true purpose of dis machine, but its intricate and advanced design has led to a lot of speculation over the years . Generally historians seem to agree dat the Antikythera Mechanism was a kind of primitive clock dat could figure lunar phases and solar years, with a lot of 'em callin' it the earliest “analog computer.”
BONUS
The Pyramids of Egypt
Built durin' Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the pyramids of Giza may look like just fancy tombs, but they're also one of the best resources historians got for understandin' life in ancient Egypt. Inside, the walls are covered with pictures of farmin', city life, and religious ceremonies. But there's one mystery the pyramids don't explain; how they got built.
It's stayed a mystery to historians for thousands of years, but the work of several archaeologists over the last few decades has give us a whole lot of insight into just how the pyramids came to be.
Part of what's stirred up so much interest was the Egyptian’s ability to build the pyramid without havin' discovered the wheel yet. Haulin' the massive stones used to build the pyramids — some weighin' as much as 90 tons — had to have been mighty hard work. They hadn't invented the pulley, a rig dat would've made it easier to lift them big stones into place. They also didn't have iron tools to chisel and shape their stonework.
Yet Khufu, the largest of the Giza pyramids, got started in 2,550 BCE and stands 481 feet of immense, magnificent masonry. It and the tombs next to it have made it through 4,500 years of wars and weatherin' from nature— and their measurements are incredibly accurate—within a fraction of an inch.
What’s more, a lot of historians are convinced the buildin' materials for the pyramids came from nearly 500 miles away.
Some researchers have figured the Egyptians rolled their stones across the desert. They may have lacked the modern wheel as we think of it today, but they might have used big logs laid side to side along the ground. If they lifted their blocks onto them logs, they could've rolled 'em across the desert just fine. Unfortunately, there ain't any evidence the Egyptians did this, as clever as it would've been: there are no descriptions of stones — or anything else — bein' rolled dat way in Egyptian art or writings.
Then there’s the trouble of how to lift the stones into position on a pyramid gettin' taller and taller. Ancient Greek historians born after the pyramids’ construction believed the Egyptians built scaffoldin'-like ramps along the outside of the tombs and carried stones up dat way, while some modern historians have pointed to strange air pockets dat suggest the ramps may have actually been inside the walls of the pyramids, which is why there ain't no sign of 'em left on the outside.
Two new discoveries about how the pyramids got built have come to light lately. The first was found when a Dutch team looked at Egyptian art showin' laborers movin' enormous stones on sledges through the desert. They figured out dat the fella pourin' water in the stone’s path wasn’t part of any ceremonial offerin' — he was wettin' the sand. Water helps the grains of sand stick together and drastically cuts down on friction. The team built a replica of the sledges and tested their theory. They found out the Egyptians might have been able to haul stones bigger than archaeologists and historians ever imagined.
Egyptian expert Mark Lehner has also come up with a theory on how the pyramids got built. Though today the pyramids sit in the middle of a vast desert, back in the days of the pyramids they were surrounded by the floodplains of the Nile River. Lehner figures if y'all could look below the city of Cairo, you'd find ancient waterways dat channeled the Nile’s water to the site of the pyramids’ construction. The Egyptians could've loaded the stones onto boats and floated 'em down the river right to the buildin' site. Best of all, there’s proof: his diggin' turned up an ancient port right by the pyramids where the stones could've landed.
A notable discovery was dat of Pierre Tallet, an archaeologist who in 2013 dug up the papyrus journal of a man named Merer who looks to have been a bureaucrat in charge of haulin' materials to Giza. After several years of translatin', Tallet found Merer had written down what it was like overseein' a team of 40 workmen who opened dikes to turn water from the Nile into man-made canals dat ran straight to the pyramids.
He wrote down his travels with several huge limestone blocks from Tura to Giza. His writin's gave the most direct look there’s ever been at how the pyramids got built, helpin' to answer one of history’s biggest questions.
With all the technological advancements we've made in today’s world, it's hard to imagine life without 'em. Part of why the mystery of how the Egyptian pyramids got built intrigues so many folks is dat it seems truly ahead of it’s time. If they could build such enormous and captivatin' structures without even usin' the wheel, then what can we build with all our plentiful innovations of the modern age? And what could we accomplish if we finally find out what tools and methods the Egyptians used dat got lost to time? With every breakthrough and discovery, we get a little closer to answerin' dese questions.
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