Which lost invention was the biggest loss?

Which lost invention was the biggest loss?

  • Antikythera mechanism

    Votes: 17 16.7%
  • Damascus steel

    Votes: 10 9.8%
  • Flexible glass

    Votes: 12 11.8%
  • Greek fire

    Votes: 12 11.8%
  • Iron pillar of Delhi

    Votes: 7 6.9%
  • Roman concrete

    Votes: 37 36.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 7 6.9%

  • Total voters
    102
The ancients were responsible for several scientific achievements that were eventually lost to history. Of these technologies, which would have made the biggest historical impact if, rather than being lost, they were retained, refined, and used extensively by successive generations and proliferated to other cultures?

I got most of this list from the Wikipedia article on the subject and related links, but to summarize...

Antikythera mechanism: Long a subject of conspiracy theories, this Greek clockwork contraption dating back to several centuries before the birth of Christ seems to have been an early analogue computer used to study astronomical features. We only have the one artifact, and while there hypothetically could have been more, we do not have evidence of anything like it for ages afterwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Damascus steel: Produced from the late Classical Era to almost modern times, these ingot-based blades were uniquely strong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

Flexible glass: This one may be apocryphal, but the idea does not seem more outlandish than some other entries on this list. It is said that a Roman inventor produced glass resistant to shattering - that is, if dropped, it would merely bruise in such a way that could be easily repaired - in the first century AD. Fearing economic crisis if widely adopted, Emperor Tiberius had the inventor killed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass

Greek fire: Famously used to defend Constantinople from Arab invaders, this Byzantine weapon was a chemical mixture that set water ablaze, capable of being propelled from a Medieval flamethrower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

Iron pillar of Delhi: Built sometime during the lifespan of the Gupta Empire in India, this giant rod is abnormally resistant to rusting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pillar_of_Delhi

Roman concrete: Developed in the Roman Republic and used well into the Imperial era, this material was incredibly durable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

Other: I left off a few from the aforementioned list, especially the more recent inventions, but if you know of any lost technology, whether it was lost permanently or merely temporarily, which you feel could have made an even bigger impact, please share!
 
The Antikythera mechanism isn't that immediately useful, but if it continued to be produced and there was high demand for such mechanisms, it would incentivize higher precision toolmaking and that would be a massive change.
 
Roman concrete: Developed in the Roman Republic and used well into the Imperial era, this material was incredibly durable.
This wasn't really true for the Byzantine (Eastern Roman). They mostly used it for different purposes, and many of the Roman Churches of the 12th century use Roman concrete for mortar and other construction purposes.

Famously used to defend Constantinople from Arab invaders, this Byzantine weapon was a chemical mixture that set water ablaze, capable of being propelled from a Medieval flamethrower.
This wasn't really lost either as various Byzantine contemporaries had their own variant incendiary weapons. The effectiveness of Greek fire is also overstated in media now. The substance was highly dangerous to handle and slight wind changes meant that the stream of the fire going towards enemies could change direction and burn friendly troops. It couldn't be transported long distances to use in sieges like gunpowder because of its extreme volatility.

Damascus steel: Produced from the late Classical Era to almost modern times, these ingot-based blades were uniquely strong.
Damascus Steel being this sort of super blade is widely seen as a myth. Damascus steel is the steel with the many ripples and patterns in it. Its also known as crucible/wootz steel and its origin is said to be from India rather than Damascus where many of them were sold from. The riples on the Damascus steel was as a result of using folded steel. This allowed smiths to use inferior metals and combine them together to get a better quality blade. This sort of pattern folding technique was heavily used in Japan, where they had very inferior quality iron-ore deposits.
 
Damascus Steel being this sort of super blade is widely seen as a myth. Damascus steel is the steel with the many ripples and patterns in it. Its also known as crucible/wootz steel and its origin is said to be from India rather than Damascus where many of them were sold from. The riples on the Damascus steel was as a result of using folded steel. This allowed smiths to use inferior metals and combine them together to get a better quality blade. This sort of pattern folding technique was heavily used in Japan, where they had very inferior quality iron-ore deposits.

You’re thinking of pattern-welded steel, which is nothing like Wootz Damascus except in appearance. Pattern-welding produce a cosmetically similar result and is commonly referred to as Damascus, while true Damascus is now called Wootz or Wootz Damascus. Wootz is crucible steel made with iron ore containing small amounts of Vanadium. It’s not folded but cast and the ingot is then hammered into blade shape. With deliberate heat-treating the Vanadium form bands of Vanadium carbides which is the cause of it’s unique appearance.

Because the carbides themselves are harder than steel, Wootz allows the smith to temper the blade to a lower hardness, making it springier while retaining good edge holding. It is by no means a miracle steel however as this edge holding is only for cutting soft material like flesh and fabric. Hitting hard armor with this soft blade would cause significant edge deformation and thus dull it.

Wootz being crucible steel is very clean as the impurities float to the surface in the melt. However multiple forge folding of the steel like the method common in East Asia also purify the steel by moving impurities to the surface. It’s a myth that Japanese swords are made of inferior material because their ore is less pure. There are many ways to purify steel. Some are more labor intensive.

It’s speculated that Wootz disappeared when the Vanadium containing iron ore was mined out in India by around 1750. However the crucible steel process continued to be widely practiced in India, Central Asia and the Middle East. There are a handful of smith making Wootz today. It’s pretty simple these days since we can add Vanadium into the melt, something not possible centuries ago.

There are also many common knife steels today that are designed to form hard carbides and increase wear resistance. A knife made from D2 for example may not look like Wootz but it’ll have much higher wear than anything from the past.
 
The Antikythera mechanism isn't that immediately useful, but if it continued to be produced and there was high demand for such mechanisms, it would incentivize higher precision toolmaking and that would be a massive change.

What might be the most plausible possible applications for such higher precision toolmaking in the Mediterranean of that era?
 
What might be the most plausible possible applications for such higher precision toolmaking in the Mediterranean of that era?
Its worth to remember that steam power was also discovered in that era but quickly diacarted as a curiosity because they couldn't find any aplication for it. Just because a tool that could revolutionice a post industrial revolution society gets discovered by a pre industrial one doesn't mean that they would develop more for having it. Chances are their society doesn't find any use from it in their current economical needs and just discart it.
 
The mechanism was apparently useful for navigation. The actual one found had been repaired at least once and possibly several times. An obvious spin-off application would be mechanical clocks. The ancients used various water clocks which are large, heavy and require regular refilling. Dependable navigation out of sight of land means determining east-west location based on an accurate knowledge of the difference in time between where you left from and where you currently are. That problem was not solved until the British development of sea going clocks in the late 18th century.
 
The biggest loss by far imo is Euclid’s Elements. Logical and mathematic analysis to the world’s seemingly inscrutable mysteries is the foundation of all science.
 
I think it's Greek Fire... Imagine if Britain had got hold of it. We could have coated the Duke of Medina Sedonia in naptha at a hundred yards with the siphon.

Indeed we could have painted the world orange rather than pink! BURN THEM ALL!

/Britanniadaydreams.
 
What might be the most plausible possible applications for such higher precision toolmaking in the Mediterranean of that era?
Higher precision toolmaking would have implications for ancient cranes, watermills, moving parts on ships, siege engines, and as @Claudius mentions, it could lead to the invention of mechanical clocks. Additionally, the production of all hand tools and weapons would be slightly more efficient because better tools means less time preparing/polishing/sharpening, less probability that tools break while working, etc. Over decades and centuries this would have significantly greater effects.

Effects of mass production of the Iron Pillar of Delhi could be similar, due to the process to construct it that involved forge welding many pieces of wrought iron together. There would be many more people involved in metallurgy and increase in the rate of small innovations over time because there are more blacksmiths.
 
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I agree with others that the Antikythera mechanism could have been the vanguard of mechanical clocks and calculators, although you would need to preserve the knowledge that led to its creation rather than the object itself.

Flexible Glass is bollocks. Even ancient authors agree to that. And for a classical author to tell you something is bollocks, it must be really over the top.

There's nothing 'abnormal' about the Delhi pillar, and its rust-resistance is an accidental side-effect of its fabrication, never reproduced again despite the high skills of Indian smiths. Hardly an 'invention'.

Roman concrete has never really been lost: its production was just too expensive for a state that is not an empire with access to volcanic sands.

The same could be said about Damascus steel: as Richard V pointed out, it only requires access to the right material.

There are plenty of equivalent to Greek Fire that has been developed throughout history. It had the right viscosity to be deployed projected via siphons and pumps, but this ability does not appear to have been the game-changer people believe.


I'm a fan of the Gallic Reaper http://www.gnrtr.com/Generator.html?pi=208&cp=3 . This device could have freed up huge amounts of labour through history to do things other than harvest grain like men possessed for weeks at a time.

Probably the best choice so far.
 
Do people really think the only Antikythera mechanism was the one that sank? How many others do you think were in Alexandria, or successfully crossed the seas?
 
Do people really think the only Antikythera mechanism was the one that sank? How many others do you think were in Alexandria, or successfully crossed the seas?

We have no real indication where the Antikythera mechanism came from nor where it was being sent to when it sank to the ground. Its name is derived from the Greek island next to which it was found.
 
gall03.jpg

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Strone reliefs of the Gallic reaper, it was a real thing.

Another one is the ancient Chinese seed drill.

74c787b8f6423af5e851cc096580a6ef.jpg


upload_2019-6-7_4-42-18.jpeg


This is another agricultural efficiency machine that could have freed up labour, I also think this one might have also freed up a fair bit of food because it was more efficient with grain. Perhaps farmers might only have to keep 1/6 or 1/7 instead of 1/4 or 1/5 of their harvest as seed for next years crop.
 
We have no real indication where the Antikythera mechanism came from nor where it was being sent to when it sank to the ground. Its name is derived from the Greek island next to which it was found.


Yes, I get that. But given that we know of complex mechanical devices in the Hellenistic world, assuming this was a one off seems surprising. The wiki notes classical literature references similar devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_devices_in_ancient_literature
 
@Riain I am grateful for your bringing the Gallic Reaper to general attention. I suspect the major lesson here is that inventions that run counter to deep social imperatives tend to fail and be forgotten, rather than social evolution being primarily driven by innovation.

But in a very specific context--one unfortunately anachronistic to your reference's theory of who invented the Reaper, when and why---there was an interesting TL going some years ago regarding the glorification of the Greek colonial city-state of Massalia, modern Marseilles. My own participation in the author's development of the TL, as a commentator, rather pushed my own normative ideas, I will admit, and these were accepted only to a limited degree. As I saw it though the opportunity here was the possibility of an unusual degree, for a Greek colony, of cross-cultural hybridism between the Hellenistic culture of the city state and its Gallic regional allies. One thing the author leaned on a bit more heavily than I thought plausible was the specific potentials of Hellenistic technological innovation, which I thought overblown and more suitably justified, if at all, as emerging from Greco-Gallic syncretism, and a more photo-capitalist liberal social concept somehow emerging from that. Capitalism very definitely is fertile ground for inception and retention and dissemination of technological innovation.

Now your bringing forth the Gallic Reaper seems in retrospect to better justify both of our hobbyhorses--except for Petr Chuksin's theory that actually the thing was really invented by some Roman, and not until the first century CE. Had it been developed by the southern Gauls some centuries before, that would speak to a general grounds for supposing the Gauls might be quite receptive to Hellenistic tinkering, and had such an innovation been in the cards earlier, a basis unsuspected by me or the author for expansive demographics among the southern Gauls integrating into a Massalian League federal state based on a quasi- or proto-capitalistic set of social dynamics might have existed. What in ancient terms might be seen as a labor shortage could be offset and overcome by high productivity in agriculture back in the heartland, and exported by Massalian expansionism quite far afield.

As noted, I and the author never seemed to quite see eye to eye on the two-way potentials of Gallic culture transforming the Hellenic one into something quite new and different, and to be sure it is pretty arrogant and presumptuous to declare just what sort of society we could reasonably expect to see emerging from such hybridism, and I was rather biased in my normative desire to see something in particular come out of it.

In fact I suppose European capitalism, which I see as the substrate cultivating both the expansion of European technology, science as a new academic category and enterprise, and political and philosophical liberalism and the general Enlightenment movement, had to wait until a certain critical mass of development was reached via High Middle Ages developments, and that similarly elsewhere in the world capitalism and with it all that other stuff would have to wait until a certain critical mass of technological inventory, population density, and volumes of trade, in certain broad types of general social situations, not just any will do determined by technology and demographics and trade levels alone, had accumulated in the right circumstances. In short lost technology never represents real lost opportunities--it is the other way round, technologies get lost, when they aren't mere legends anyway (gotta wonder what "flexible glass" could possibly be for instance) because the societies they are found in just aren't ready to incorporate them yet, and will be reinvented in due time when they do have a place.

But certainly this staid Marxist assumption needs challenging every now and then. Thank you for that!
 
whoever invented fire ~2 million BCE and then died without telling anyone because he set himself on fire


more seriously though, its rather difficult to imagine many "lost inventions" that would make such a difference, usually technology tends to limit what can be invented, not the other way around.
 
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