10.
The Immortal Battery Physics professor at University of Oxford,
Robert Walker, acquired a very interesting device in the 1800s.
Walker somehow got his hands on a battery, a simplistic device used to push a hanging
metal ball back and forth between a pair of small bells.
Over 175 years later, the Oxford Electric Bell is still ringing.
It's rung over 10 billion times and the battery shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
It's now known as the most durable battery in the world, an immortal source of power!
What makes it so fascinating is that this piece of technology is a complete mystery
to the experts.
Nobody knows how it's functioned for so long- or how long it will continue to work.
To find out, experts would have to crack it open and nobody wants to be the one who ruins
this historic battery!
What scientists do know is that the battery appears to be made of alternating discs of
silver, zinc, sulfur, and some other mysterious materials.
When put together, these things generate low currents of electricity.
The current is so low that you can barely hear the bell ringing.
It's just a delicate kind of vibration between the two bells.
It is one of the longest running science experiments in the world and even today, nobody has been
able to replicate it.
9.
Ancient Navigation Charts In Micronesia, the Marshall Islands consist
of 34 coral atolls.
In total, it's over 1000 tiny islands and islets spread out across a huge area of hundreds
of miles of ocean.
In order to properly maintain links between all these small islands and the tiny communities
living on them, the ancient Islanders built seafaring canoes.
These vessels were pretty simple, and allowed for the Islanders to travel from place to
place.
But finding their way from one island to another proved to be a bit more difficult.
And so, the Islanders came up with a fascinating piece of technology.
They devised specialized charts which could track the locations of these islands, along
with the wave patterns.
Now, these island charts weren't maps drawn up on paper.The islanders obviously didn’t
have the advanced tools and technology that we have today..
Instead, they made their charts out of wooden sticks.
They put together a kind of rectangular box with thin sticks, with other sticks inside
the box running horizontally, vertically, and diagonally.
There are even some curved sticks to represent wave swells.
The Islanders then used tiny shells fastened to the sticks to represent the physical positions
of the islands.
The biggest map was known as a rebbelib, showing a huge piece of the Marshall Islands.
In order to train seafarers, they had a chart called the mattang, which was specifically
designed for training navigators.
Even more interesting is that they didn't simply take these maps with them, they had
to memorize them.
Still, these rudimentary maps allowed the islanders to make their way around their little
part of the world with total ease.
8.
Unbreakable Roman Glass Perhaps one of the most famous lost inventions
of the ancient world is unbreakable Roman glass.
Also known as Roman Flexible glass, this invention has been lost to time and its very existence
is technically unconfirmed.
But there are many historical accounts that talk about this impressive material so many
historians believe it really did exist.
This unbreakable, flexible glass could be dropped or thrown and could withstand heavy
damage without shattering into a million pieces.
The element of flexibility in glass is something that not even modern technology has been able
to figure out.
The closest invention of modern science is the tempered glass that we now see in phones
and all kinds of protective equipment.
But unfortunately, nobody knows who invented this spectacular technology.
That’s because the inventor didn't live long enough to share it with anyone besides
the Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar.
The legend goes that the inventor wanted to share his secret invention with the emperor
so he brought him a glass bowl that could not be broken.
But the emperor feared such a remarkable creation could cause the sudden and catastrophic depreciation
of gold and silver.
He looked at it as a new kind of precious metal, which would devalue all the precious
metal Rome had in her stockpile.
To protect his assets, the emperor ordered his head to be cut off, and his secret buried
with him.
7.
The Lost Technology of the Egyptians Up until around the 7th century BC, there
wasn't a lot of iron present in Egypt.
Iron never really became common until the Assyrians invaded.
The Egyptians never liked it because they associated iron with the evil Egyptian deity
Seth, who ruled the central deserts of Africa.
What does this have to do with ancient Egyptian technology?
The lack of iron is a major issue when it comes to explaining how the ancient Egyptians
built so many monumental structures without using iron tools.
Their greatest temples, underground tombs, and of course the pyramids were mostly made
from solid basalt, granite, and diorite.
These are extremely hard stones that are difficult to shape even with iron tools.
But according to pretty much all archaeological evidence found at these sites, the only tools
the Egyptians had were made of bronze.
What I'm trying to say here is that whatever technology was used to create these megalithic
structures 4500 years ago, it almost certainly was not brass chisels and stone hammers.
In general, the tool you're using to carve something has to be stronger than the thing
is!.
The truth is that we simply don't know what tools the Egyptians used to shape their giant
obelisks and perfectly smooth stone blocks.
6.
The Lost Roman Herb In the days of ancient Rome, there was a herb
called silphium.
It was a small plant with hardy roots, stumpy leaves, and beautiful yellow flowers.
The plant also oozed with sap that the Romans found delicious and extremely useful.
By the end of the Roman Empire, the plant was literally worth its weight in gold.
Nobody knows how the Romans figured it out, but they managed to come up with an almost
endless list of uses for this little herb.
They used its stalks in soups.
They ate its roots dipped in vinegar.
They created perfume and even used its sap as a garnish for eating flamingo brains!
It was a major ingredient in Roman cuisine.
It was also used in medical applications, its juice was an aphrodisiac in the bedroom,
and perhaps most surprisingly,it was used as the first effective form of birth control!
The shape of the plant seeds were shaped exactly like a heart – or at least, the cartoonish
version of a heart you send to someone as an emoji.
Historians believe it was the silphium seeds which were responsible for that very symbol
which we associate with romance to this very day.
Alas, the plant was so important and so popular that it was picked to death.
The ancient historian Pliny the Elder wrote that the very last silphium plant was plucked
and given to emperor Nero around the year 54 AD.
The Romans miraculously came up with the world’s solution to pretty much everything, then used
it to extinction.
And now for number 5!
But first I wanted to give a big shout to Carolyn Tallen and Mr. Hutch!
Thanks so much for watching and supporting OE.
If you are new here, be sure to subscribe and join the OE family!
5.
The Beijing Ancient Observatory There are many places on Earth that were once
used as observatories, places like Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepe.
One of the oldest actual stellar observatories was built a little more recently in the year
1442 by the Ming Dynasty of China.
They built it over the bones of a smaller, less advanced observatory that had been established
over 200 years earlier in 1227.
This observatory was never equipped with telescopes.
But they did use some pretty interesting ancient instruments to help with their studies into
the sky.
They had large cartography tools like an oversized sextant, an azimuth theodolite, and even an
armillary sphere.
These instruments may sound like a bunch of mumbo jumbo and that’s because you probably
don’t use them in your daily life- me neither!!
These were ancient tools used to measure stellar distances.
It was the best the Chinese could do at the time, to actually measure how far a certain
celestial body was from Earth.
4.
The Great Wall of Gorgan The Great Wall of Gorgan was one of the most
impressive architectural feats accomplished in the ancient world.
It's longer than the Antonine Wall and Hadrian's Wall put together.
It was constructed during the latter part of the 5th century, and remained occupied
for about 200 years by the Sasanian Empire.
This isn't exactly the most famous empire in all of history.
They were founded in the year 224 AD after the collapse of the Parthian Empire.
Their territory stretched across a huge part of the eastern Mediterranean, all the way
up to what is now Pakistan.
They lived in parts of Central Asia and all the way down to southern Arabia.
They are considered by historians to be the last Persian imperial dynasty before the Muslim
conquest starting in 633.
They were also the peak of ancient Iranian culture, with beautiful works of art, fantastic
architectural displays, and impressive fortification technology.
The Great Wall of Gorgan was a massive system of defensive lines across their northern border.
It was specifically built to protect their domain from the White Huns, also called the
Alans.
The wall was built from pretty primitive materials, just mud shaped into bricks.
And yet it was massive, with a width of over 30 feet(9 m), lined on one side by a huge
earthen bank and a ditch.
But this wasn't just a wall.
It was an entire blockade of over 38 fortresses spread out across intervals, and standardized
barracks that housed soldiers.
It took an estimated 36,000 soldiers to man this huge barrier and protect the empire.
But the wall, sadly, was not enough to protect them from the onslaught of the Muslim Army.
Within just five short years, the entire Sassanid Empire had been defeated and then absorbed
into the Islamic caliphate. 3.
The Ziggurat of Ur The Ziggurat of Ur is a phenomenal architectural
invention that was created over 4100 years ago.
It had tiered levels, which probably made it easier to build such a massive structure.
Ziggurats can be found all over Iran and Iraq.
They were once used for religious rituals and as administrative hubs for the ruling
priests and kings of old Mesopotamia.
Yet there's none more impressive than the Great Ziggurat of Ur.
It was first uncovered in the 1920s, then fully excavated by workers with the Pennsylvania
Museum in Philadelphia and the British Museum in London.
They uncovered a massive rectangular pyramid oriented directly to true north.
There were three giant staircases which led from the gate to the first terrace.
Then, a single staircase going up to the second terrace, and a final staircase going up to
the great temple at the top.
And amazingly, the whole thing is made of bricks of mud!
Plain ol’ mud shaped into bricks, baked to be hard, and then stacked one on top of
the next.
Some of these bricks weighed as much as 33 pounds(15 kg).
The entire bottom portion of the ziggurat, took about 720,000 of these bricks to complete.
Here's a really interesting difference between ziggurats and pyramids.
The ziggurats in Mesopotamia were made of mud, which was easy to handle from a primitive
technological standpoint.
Whereas the pyramids, like we already discussed, were made of wildly hard rock.
And so, it's not as much about the tools used to make this structure as it is the resources
needed to pull it off.
It was an incredibly advanced piece of architecture for its time, and built with impressive ingenuity
considering a large chunk of it is still standing.
2.
Decarbonizing Furnace Archaeologists in China have discovered an
ancient decarbonization furnace.
This impressive piece of technology dates back to the Warring States period, between
475 and 221 BC.
It was discovered inside the ruins of an ancient iron foundry at the archaeological site of
the Houduan-wan Ruins in Henan Province.
A decarbonization furnace might not sound like that big of a deal, but it was a pretty
remarkable invention almost 2500 years ago.
It was discovered inside a workshop which was used for casting tools and weapons.
They also found ceramic products, tools relating to cast iron, and an ordinary firing furnace.
If you're not sure what a decarbonization furnace is, let me quickly explain.
In simple terms, this is a specialized furnace used in metallurgy to remove carbon from something
like iron.
The metal must be heated to a temperature of over 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, and this
results in a softening of the metal.
It's a key process in making more complicated and longer-lasting metals.
And according to modern scientists, this type of iron casting technology wasn't developed
until 1947 by British scientists.
But the furnace found in China was made over 2000 years earlier!
1.
The Chariots of the Gods The cherubim appear numerous times in the
Hebrew Bible, but they're never explained in great detail.
Most religious interpretations describe the cherubim as a group of guardian angels who
act as attendants or literal guards to the divine throne in heaven.
In Genesis, it's the cherubim who place the flaming sword at the Garden of Eden to protect
the Tree of Life.
While in the Psalms and other parts of the Bible, Yahweh, the name of the Jewish God,
is said to ride upon these cherubim.
And depending on how you want to interpret the words, these things can either be seen
as actual angels or some kind of bizarre flying vehicle.
In fact, the idea of the cherubim being flying vehicles isn't even new.
In the 2nd century BC, there was a group of Kabbalah mystics who agreed the cherubim were
some kind of ancient technology, a chariot which gods used to fly across the sky.
King David, the actual author of the Psalms, even described thousands upon thousands of
flying cherubim.
It’s obviously quite difficult to know for sure what was happening over 2000 years ago.
The prophet Ezekiel, in his great vision, interpreted the cherubim not as vehicles,
but as living beings.
And if you read his words closely, it really does sound like an extraterrestrial encounter.
It really makes you wonder if the people of the ancient world saw an army of flying machines
and just didn’t know how to describe them properly.
Which ancient technology impressed you the most?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching!
Hit that subscribe button before you go, and I’ll see you again soon for another awesome
video!