Forgotten Technology: Ten Tech Secrets We Have Lost

Mankind’s ingenuity and inventiveness is unparalleled, and many would be forgiven for thinking that our history has been a steady march of progress, with the line from ancient primitives to modern day sophistication being an unbroken and positive one. But this is hardly the case.

History is rarely so neat as all that, and we have lost much in the millennia of human civilization. Great empires have risen to conquer the known world, only to fall and barely leave a trace. Much of what we achieved, what we discovered, and what we did has been rolled over by time and lost forever.

This means that what does survive is sometimes more puzzling than enlightening - old texts will occasionally refence customs, policies, people and inventions that, while clearly familiar to the original writer and their audience, baffle us. While the modern day can fill in many of the gaps, and we can sometimes make a guess at what was meant, some of this strangeness from out of our past will forever remain a mystery.

Here are ten of the strangest seemingly forgotten technologies from our history.

1. The Weapons of Archimedes

A huge lens that could destroy ships by directing and focussing the sun’s rays sounds like something out of a James Bond film (because it is). But millennia before Gusta Graves and his orbital weapon of mass destruction, the Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes apparently built such a device, only this time for real.

This was not the only weapon of war Archimedes built, either. Records survive of a great claw, capable of lifting ships entirely out of the water, as well as siege towers and defensive catapults. But try as we might, modern science has not been able to rediscover how the great polymath did it.

Sadly, Archimedes did not survive long enough to pass on all of his secrets. Despite his weapons, pressed into service as the Romans attacked his city of Syracuse, the defenders were beaten back and the city fell. Archimedes himself, angrily complaining that a soldier had interrupted his calculations, was summarily killed.