Ancient Technology Secrets

Most people assume that today represents the most advanced level of technology in every aspect of human endeavor on the planet. They feel that all technology now is superior to all earlier forms of technology, and they feel this because by and large, the technology of today is the further refined versions of technologies from days gone by. So they naturally assume technologies from hundreds or thousands of years ago were simpler and less developed than today’s technology.

And they would be wrong.

Well, let’s be clear, here. To a large extent they are correct. Almost all technology of today is superior to the corresponding technologies of hundreds or thousands of years ago. Almost. But not all. That is to say that there are some few things that were once possible but that are no longer possible to create. The secrets to these amazing technologies have been lost somewhere along the way.

One example is a legendary sword-steel called “Damascus Steel”. Swords made from this special steel could cut through a ladies silk handkerchief floating in mid-air. They could cut through the best sword steel made in Europe, and they could even cut through stone – all without dulling the edge. They could hone to an edge finer than a razor blade, yet have the strength to cut stone or resist blows from other sharp hard steel blades in a swordfight. It had the strange property of being both extremely hard and yet flexible at the same time. Swords were made of this amazing steel in Damascus, Syria from 900AD until 1750AD, and now they are made no more – and cannot be reproduced. We no longer have the technology to reproduce them. Some of these legendary swords do still exist though and have been examined. They appear to have carbon nanotubes or carbon nanowires, which is the strongest structure known to modern materials scientists, but it is inconceivable to modern metallurgists how they may have created these carbon nano-structures. Especially in the quantities needed for sword steel making. Another theory is that they somehow used a small amount of Vanadium to make them harder.
The steel itself has a telltale highly figured surface that looks almost like a paisley pattern. It is a result of the metallurgical process of creating these so-called wootz steel ingots, whose earliest roots date back to 300BCE in Sri Lanka. There have been some modern imitations that attempt to re-create Damascus steel, but none of them have been able to do it fully and properly.

Another ancient-but-now-lost technology is the so-called “ever-burning-lamps”. These were used in many places in the ancient world, including some say, in Solomon’s mines in deepest Africa. They are essentially a small lamp that burns, creates light, but it never burns out. People have opened tombs that have been shut for centuries and found it lit with these ever-burning lamps. It is said that in Solomon’s temple, these ever-burning lamps were hung high up in the ceilings to light the halls at all times.
"Now the House of Solomon the King was illuminated as by day, for in his wisdom he had made shining pearls which were like unto the sun, the moon and the stars in the roof of his house."

During the Middle Ages a number of ever-burning lamps were discovered in ancient tombs and temples. Based on ancient records we learn that these mysterious objects were found all over the world, in India, China, South America, North America, Egypt Greece, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, France and many other countries. Unfortunately, over the centuries, they have all been destroyed – usually by those who felt such things were either evil, or the devil’s work, or magical. The middle-ages was not an enlightened time for discovering amazing new technologies. In all cases – they were against the religious beliefs of the people who later found them, and so they destroyed them. Thus there are none now to examine to allow modern day scientists to try to reverse engineer the technologies and techniques used in creating them in the first place.

In ancient times, the mythological texts tell us that the Gods felt that the secret to everlasting light and perpetual fire was the property of the Gods and should not be shared with humans. Allegedly, Prometheus broke that rule and did share the secret with men, and suddenly the eternal flame was found on virtually every sacred altar around the known world. Ancient Egyptians felt that the noblemen and noblewomen of their time needed light in the afterlife so they could find their road, and so the eternal flames were set up in those ancient tombs.

Approximately 170 authors from medieval times have written about the discoveries of these ever-burning lamps in their era. Plutarch described one that burned over the door of the temple dedicated to Jupiter/Ammon. The priests there said that it burned without fuel for over 1500 years and neither wind nor rain could extinguish it.
At Edessa, Syria, in 527AD, the soldiers of emperor Justinian discovered one of these lamps in a niche over a gateway. It was protected from wind and water, but the soldiers read the inscription which stated that it had been lit in 27AD, and they realized it had been burning for 500 years, so they destroyed it. Also in the tomb of Prince Pallas, son of King Evander, in the year 140AD, a lamp was found that had been burning for over 2000 years since the tomb had been sealed. They tried to put it out with water, and by blowing it out, but that didn’t work. Eventually they had to pour out the strange liquid in the lamp in order to put it out.

In England in later years, they were still discovering these ever-burning lamps. In 1534, King Henry VIII wanted to create the Church of England to suit his purposes, and so he broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. In that process, he ordered all Catholic monasteries to be destroyed or taken over and repurposed. When they went to the tomb of Constantius Chlorus, the father of Emperor Constantine the Great, they found one of these lamps burning there which had been burning undisturbed since his death in 300AD.

I suppose you could choose to simply dismiss these stories. But there are a lot to dismiss. There are hundreds of accounts stretching across thousands of years from many countries and from many authors. Are they all delusional? Are they all hoaxes? Or are they merely describing a technology that we simply have lost and have not gotten around to re-creating? Just because we don’t understand the principle of how something works, is that a good enough reason to deny it outright? Doesn’t that put us in the same category of prejudiced mentalityas those medieval church officials who discounted them as ‘Devil’s work” and destroyed them all?

Keeping an open mind then, since we have none left to examine, we can only speculate as to the nature of these lamps. Tombs may have been sealed from human entrance, but they are not, I think, air tight, so a lack of oxygen would not put a light out. Or what if it was not actually a ‘flame’ in the traditional sense? They did describe it as a flame, but what are the other options? Was it a radioactive light that lit the room, like uranium, or some other radioactive isotope, which they called “fire” because that was their simple interpretation of anything that was lit from within? Or could it be some form of liquid electricity-based light that we have not discovered yet?

Speaking of electricity, it seems that electricity was discovered and used somehow by ancients as well. Even ‘pre-ancients’. Specifically, there was a French Rabbi named Jechiele, a court advisor to Louis IX in the 13th century, who apparently used electricity to light a ‘magical’ lamp in the front of his house day and night with no flame, no wick, no burning fluid. He also had rigged up his door-knocker to a source of electricity and when an unwanted visitor came to his door, he touched a nail to the wall in his study and delivered a shock of respectable voltage to the would-be visitor.
Thousands of years before that, in the Zorostrarian faith, in the region which was later known as Persia, the Magi of that faith apparently had electricity and could control it to produce light and power for various effects in their temples.

But then in a much, much MUCH older case, the Leonard Nimoy narrated show from the 1970’s called “In Search Of” showed a story where researchers in California’s Death Valley were examining the area of some caves that were inhabited 800,000 years ago by people who had some remarkable technology and had drawn pictures of flying craft on the cave walls, and they discovered a curious rock that was round, but flattened, like a smartie, and circumscribing the edge was a string of apparently 'drilled' holes. The researcher picked it up as a curiosity and then took it back to the lab. They x-rayed it and then cut it in half to be certain, and sure enough, inside was a strange manufactured device. A metal coil embedded inside a porcelain core, embedded inside the rock. As it turned out, after analyzing it, the scientists concluded that this was an 800,000 year old spark plug. I guessed that it may have been used to ignite flames in a pot to impress others with apparent “magic” effects. But it was a technology. And, you’ll note, this is technology we don’t have today. Our current spark plugs have wires to deliver the electricity to make them work. These didn’t.

Also, on the theme of electricity, we cannot leave out a more recent marvel of lost technology. In the early 1900’s a scientist by the name of Nikola Tesla distinguished himself by creating electromagnetic fields, which became the basis for motors, and by inventing the concept of AC electric power which you are using right at this moment to run the computer you are reading this on, and he had invented a number of further advances which no one has been able to recreate since he died.

Specifically, he could deliver electricity through the ground or through the air without wires from his plant in Colorado Springs. Like controlled lightning. He had created something called a ‘death ray’. He had created something he called an ‘electricity tap’ which was an inexhaustible source of clean electric power which could be set up cheaply anywhere – even in the middle of deep space. But his main benefactor/sponsor George Westinghouse would not fund these projects to put them out to the public because he could not make money from them. In fact, AC power was very useful – he made a fortune building electric plants, but then to give people the means to make their own power – well, that would significantly undermine his profits. So he stopped Tesla from bringing those plans out.
Tesla eventually took the secrets to his grave, and he died a poor man living in a flat in New York City. Government agents raided his room afterward and took all his papers. Who knows where the secrets of those technologies might be now.