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4 Skills Humans Have Lost Over Time
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Duration: | 11:35 |
Uploaded: | 2022-03-31 |
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Some practices and skills known by early humans have been lost to time. Sometimes this is because of changing environments or economic conditions, or sometimes, it's because the technology was so deadly that only a few were allowed to know it. Find out more with Michael Aranda in a new episode of SciShow!
SciShow is on TikTok! Check us out at https://www.tiktok.com/@scishow
-----
Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scishow
-----
Huge thanks go to the following Patreon supporters for helping us keep SciShow free for everyone forever:
Tomás Lagos González, Sam Lutfi. Bryan Cloer, Christoph Schwanke, Kevin Bealer, Jacob, Jason A Saslow, Nazara, Tom Mosner, Ash, Eric Jensen, Jeffrey Mckishen, Matt Curls, Alex Hackman, Christopher R Boucher, Piya Shedden, Jeremy Mysliwiec, charles george, Chris Peters, Adam Brainard, Dr. Melvin Sanicas, Harrison Mills, Silas Emrys, Alisa Sherbow
------
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?
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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/scishow
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----------
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/technology/pozzolana
https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2810.htm
https://unews.utah.edu/roman-concrete/
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/102/7/1435/353606/Phillipsite-and-Al-tobermorite-mineral-cements
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-secrets-of-ancient-romes-buildings-234992/
https://www.britannica.com/technology/concrete-building-material
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pantheon-building-Rome-Italy
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210316-the-legendary-fabric-that-no-one-knows-how-to-make
https://uh.edu/engines/epi385.htm
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/31335/631166.pdf?sequence=1#page=167
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Greek-fire
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106585?origin=crossref
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-fog-of-war
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-used-in-nukes-thats-so-secret-nobody-can-say-what-it-is
https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/edu/eesj/gradpubs/GeneralMags/patel_chinesepurple_Archeology.pdf
https://brill.com/view/journals/east/17/1/article-p94_6.xml
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2007/cs/b606268g
Images:
https://bit.ly/3wRfnlx
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitruvius_bust_at_Technical_University_of_Munich.jpeg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20_to_40mm_recycled_aggregates_(6069277558).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puzzolane_stones_from_Vesuvius_Italy.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pouzzolane.jpg
https://bit.ly/3tUXC2E
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AAC_13.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caesarea_Concrete_Bath.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muslin_transparency_2015_Kolkata.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman%27s_muslin_dress_and_straw_bonnet_c._1830.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_Muslin_Depiction.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Renaldis_muslin_woman.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Victoria_Memorial_Kolkata_-_Muslin.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DhakaCity1861.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gossypium_arboreum2.jpg
https://bit.ly/3IVa0nO
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muslin_men.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greekfire-madridskylitzes1.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand-siphon_for_Greek_fire,_medieval_illumination_(detail).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arbalest_flamethrower_Greek_fire,_Byzantine_Empire_(reconstruction).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trident_warheads.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinpoh/3548617540
https://www.flickr.com/photos/carolemage/12930137013
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Recreated_colored_terracotta_warriors.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Han_Luoyang_Mural_of_Liubo_players.jpg
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4352/9/5/273/htm
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tripod_cauldron,_earthenware_with_paint,_Western_Han_Dynasty.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HKU_MAG_Fung_Ping_Shan_Museum_Han_Dynasty_Horse.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egyptian_blue_Altes_Museum.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Western_Han_blue_glass_bowl.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Chinese_jade_Han_dynasty_Frog_11022019_1615.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Han_Dynasty_tomb_fresco_of_chariots,_horses,_and_men,_Luoyang_2.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Bi_Glass_disc_Eastern_Zhou_or_Han_dynasty_11022019_1639.jpg
Some practices and skills known by early humans have been lost to time. Sometimes this is because of changing environments or economic conditions, or sometimes, it's because the technology was so deadly that only a few were allowed to know it. Find out more with Michael Aranda in a new episode of SciShow!
SciShow is on TikTok! Check us out at https://www.tiktok.com/@scishow
-----
Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scishow
-----
Huge thanks go to the following Patreon supporters for helping us keep SciShow free for everyone forever:
Tomás Lagos González, Sam Lutfi. Bryan Cloer, Christoph Schwanke, Kevin Bealer, Jacob, Jason A Saslow, Nazara, Tom Mosner, Ash, Eric Jensen, Jeffrey Mckishen, Matt Curls, Alex Hackman, Christopher R Boucher, Piya Shedden, Jeremy Mysliwiec, charles george, Chris Peters, Adam Brainard, Dr. Melvin Sanicas, Harrison Mills, Silas Emrys, Alisa Sherbow
------
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?
SciShow Tangents Podcast: https://scishow-tangents.simplecast.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/scishow
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scishow
Instagram: http://instagram.com/thescishow
#SciShow
----------
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/technology/pozzolana
https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2810.htm
https://unews.utah.edu/roman-concrete/
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/msa/ammin/article/102/7/1435/353606/Phillipsite-and-Al-tobermorite-mineral-cements
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-secrets-of-ancient-romes-buildings-234992/
https://www.britannica.com/technology/concrete-building-material
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pantheon-building-Rome-Italy
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210316-the-legendary-fabric-that-no-one-knows-how-to-make
https://uh.edu/engines/epi385.htm
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/31335/631166.pdf?sequence=1#page=167
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Greek-fire
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106585?origin=crossref
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-fog-of-war
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-used-in-nukes-thats-so-secret-nobody-can-say-what-it-is
https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/edu/eesj/gradpubs/GeneralMags/patel_chinesepurple_Archeology.pdf
https://brill.com/view/journals/east/17/1/article-p94_6.xml
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2007/cs/b606268g
Images:
https://bit.ly/3wRfnlx
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitruvius_bust_at_Technical_University_of_Munich.jpeg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20_to_40mm_recycled_aggregates_(6069277558).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puzzolane_stones_from_Vesuvius_Italy.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pouzzolane.jpg
https://bit.ly/3tUXC2E
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AAC_13.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caesarea_Concrete_Bath.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muslin_transparency_2015_Kolkata.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman%27s_muslin_dress_and_straw_bonnet_c._1830.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_Muslin_Depiction.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Renaldis_muslin_woman.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Victoria_Memorial_Kolkata_-_Muslin.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DhakaCity1861.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gossypium_arboreum2.jpg
https://bit.ly/3IVa0nO
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muslin_men.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greekfire-madridskylitzes1.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand-siphon_for_Greek_fire,_medieval_illumination_(detail).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arbalest_flamethrower_Greek_fire,_Byzantine_Empire_(reconstruction).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trident_warheads.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinpoh/3548617540
https://www.flickr.com/photos/carolemage/12930137013
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Recreated_colored_terracotta_warriors.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Han_Luoyang_Mural_of_Liubo_players.jpg
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4352/9/5/273/htm
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tripod_cauldron,_earthenware_with_paint,_Western_Han_Dynasty.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HKU_MAG_Fung_Ping_Shan_Museum_Han_Dynasty_Horse.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egyptian_blue_Altes_Museum.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Western_Han_blue_glass_bowl.JPG
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Chinese_jade_Han_dynasty_Frog_11022019_1615.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Han_Dynasty_tomb_fresco_of_chariots,_horses,_and_men,_Luoyang_2.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Bi_Glass_disc_Eastern_Zhou_or_Han_dynasty_11022019_1639.jpg
Thanks to Linode Cloud Computing, for supporting this episode of SciShow. Head to linode.com/scishow to learn more and get a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. [♪ INTRO] Knowledge isn’t forever.
History is full of things like personal histories, languages, and even whole technologies and techniques that we no longer remember. But one of the coolest things about archaeology is that it gives us a chance to re-learn things.
So here are four examples of really cool technology we kind of lost, how scientists are using modern techniques to study and re-learn them, and, ultimately, why these techniques nearly disappeared. One of the first examples of impressive ancient engineering is Roman concrete. Rome built some truly epic buildings, and many of them are still around today, like the Pantheon.
Roman concrete was incredibly durable, especially when we’re talking about its use in marine environments, like building harbors. Building something that can last thousands of years in wave-wracked seawater is truly impressive. But with the decline of the Roman empire, people seem to have more or less stopped using this super durable concrete on a wide scale. And for a long time, we didn’t really know what made this concrete so durable. I mean, we knew just a tiny bit. For instance, thanks to recipes recorded by people like Vitruvius, historians knew that the Romans used a different recipe than modern concrete.
Concrete, in general, is a mix of aggregates, like little bits of rocks or brick, water, and cement, and varying that recipe can change its physical properties. The Romans used a particularly involved mix of aggregate along with lime, seawater, and volcanic ash. But not just any ash: It was a special kind called pozzolana, which was dug up near Naples. This mix seems to be special, since people would actually pay to import this ash when they were building stuff.
But we didn’t know what actually made this mix special. In a study published in 2017, scientists decided to find out. They got samples in the form of long, cylindrical cores that had been drilled out of Roman ruins and then used a microscope and X-rays to look at the minerals inside. They found that the answer to the incredible durability of Roman concrete lies in the chemistry inherent in the concrete, in large part thanks to the mix of both seawater and that special volcanic ash.
Silica and aluminum oxide from the pozzolana reacts with lime and the seawater to create crystals of a mineral called tobermorite, which reinforces the concrete and makes it less likely to crack. Even better, further exposure to seawater causes the growth of more tobermorite, explaining why Roman concrete did so well in coastal projects. But if this was such cool tech, how did the whole world just kind of seemingly forget about it? Well, in this case, the answer partly has to do with demand. In short, with the collapse of the Roman empire, the nearby demand for this kind of mega-engineering went away. It no longer made sense to build quite as grandly or to pay for the special pozzolana to be dug up and shipped. With less demand, the knowledge of how to make this concrete started to fade away.
It didn’t entirely disappear, we have examples of engineers still reaching for pozzolana long after the Romans fell, but it may have become more of a trade secret or kind of oral memory rather than a codified recipe. It was only later, in the 1700s, that science kind of formally recognized and “re-discovered” it again. The moral is that technologies exist in context. When it made sense for Roman concrete to be widely used, it was. When it wasn’t, it faded into memory.
Speaking of being widely used, Roman concrete might make a further resurgence sometime soon. A number of scientists have suggested that the formula, or something similar to it using coal ash, might be a good candidate for marine uses today, and produce fewer carbon emissions. Now onto something softer…Dhaka muslin was a thin, high-quality fabric that came from what’s now Bangladesh. It had been produced for centuries before eventually becoming a big hit in Europe in the late 1700s. The material was made of a special variety of cotton that grew along the Meghna River, which had very short, easily frayed threads.
This made the material kind of a beast to work with and turning it into fabric required a convoluted, 16-step process that would have required multiple households. One step could only be done on boats, for instance, as the material needed to be a certain level of humidity. The payoff of all this work, however, was incredible.
The material was very light and thin. It was said that you could fit 18 meters of fabric into a pocket-sized snuff box and it could apparently reach thread counts around 800-1200 threads per square inch. But by the 1900s, it seems to have disappeared. So why’d we stop making it? In short, because the British East India Company or EIC made it impossible for farmers to make a profit off of it. In the 1700s and 1800’s, the EIC effectively took over large portions of India and started to muck with the system. One thing they did, for instance, was to put the farmers into terrible financial situations where it was really easy to go into irrecoverable debt.
In the meantime, British manufacturers flooded the market with inferior look-alikes. The end result was that the farmers, no longer able to make a stable living off it, abandoned the practice. And without people to continue growing it, the variety of cotton it was based on went extinct. By the 1900s Dhaka muslin was a thing of the past.
That said, scientists are trying to renew the industry. Luckily, the technique was written down, so we do know how to make it, but we still need that special cotton. And although it doesn’t grow anymore, we may be able to kind of recreate it. And it’s all thanks to leaves preserved at the Kew Gardens. Scientists could extract the DNA from those leaves and form a genetic signature for this plant. Then it was off to the races, they started a scavenger hunt for the closest wild plant near that one river and found one that’s a potential cousin or descendant.
Today, they've grown those plants and are making something close to the original garments again. So what can we learn from Dhaka muslin’s disappearance? Again, it kind of comes down to economics, but in this case, specifically, trade and colonialism were disrupting the industry. We can see this in other places too. The Haya in Africa had a unique way of making a very high-quality steel and were doing it long before many other people had the technology, but the technique was nearly lost in the 1900s when cheap European steel flooded the market. So, in both of the last two points, the answer for why something was lost kind of boiled down to economics.
Sometimes, however, techniques are lost because they were too secret to spread around… If you look at the history of warfare, one of the most mysterious and terrifying weapons ever invented in the past was probably Greek Fire. It was introduced by the Byzantine Greeks in the 600’s CE. And it was described as a liquid that was discharged through a tube or grenade, which could burn on water with thunderous noise and a lot of smoke. There have been many proposed explanations for what this liquid could be, but we don’t know exactly what it was because its identity was a secret. It was a military asset, so the people who knew how to make it probably didn’t want their enemies learning the process. Figuring out what it may have been generally boils down to meticulous research of existing historical records for clues and comparing proposed concoctions to see if they match the expected properties. For instance, people have proposed it’s based on saltpeter, kind of like an early gunpowder, but others think it was probably based on crude or refined petroleum, something like naphtha or napalm.
In this case, the people who made this stuff purposefully didn’t want a lot of people to know how it worked. It’s been suggested that it may have been whipped up in a central lab, sealed in containers, then delivered to the front lines. So soldiers using it wouldn’t have ever known exactly how it was made. Even if it was captured by the enemy, they wouldn’t know how to make it. It's also been suggested that it may have been pretty complicated to actually use and needed a whole system to make it work, like how to prep it, heat it, and use it. If true, it's plausible that the process could have been compartmentalized, so even if you knew part of the system, you still wouldn’t be able to figure it all out by yourself. But the secrecy meant that the knowledge of how to make this was tenuous. Some scholars suggest that only a small number of individuals understood the whole system at any one given time. And, eventually, as regimes were overturned and people died, the secret was lost. So the reason the tech was forgotten was mainly due to secrecy. And we can see this with a lot of proprietary or secret stuff, even today. In the early 2000s, there was apparently a bit of a snafu when the US military needed to refurbish their nukes, but there were problems figuring out how to get more of a substance code named “fogbank” because only a handful of records had survived and most of the folks who knew how to make it had retired. Now for something less terrifying.
Painted on some of the terracotta soldiers in China was an unusual, bright lavender pigment, which we now know as Han purple. An interesting feature because at the time it was being made, from around 800 BCE to 220 CE, purple and blue pigments were very rare. What’s more, you can’t find this specific pigment in nature; you have to make it.
So a vibrant purple pigment that far back in time is an incredible achievement, but Han purple didn’t stick around. Its usage died out with the end of the Han dynasty, around the early 200s CE, and it wasn’t rediscovered until the 1990s. When scientists first found the pigment, they didn’t know what exactly it was. There was no written record of how it was made, so scientists had to rely on experimentation and analysis to find out. To figure out what was in the stuff, scientists tried dissolving it in acid as well as using techniques like bombarding it with X-rays under a microscope, kind of like what the Roman concrete group did. Thanks to these techniques, they figured out that the purple is a compound that contains the elements like barium and copper along with silicon and oxygen bound to it. They then experimented and found that they could replicate it, or make something like it, by cooking a barium mineral, such as witherite or barite, with quartz, a copper mineral, and a lead salt. But it was a complicated technical feat …they needed scalding temperatures of around 1000 degrees Celsius, and had to keep up that heat for a long time.
This all raises the question, how the heck did the ancient scientists discover something this complicated? One suggestion is that it was the result of trade and cultural exchange, since it’s similar to another ancient synthetic pigment called Egyptian Blue, but the logistics here seem iffy. Egypt and China are not very close to each other geographically. Another option is that it was discovered by glass making or trying to create imitation jade. But why’d it stop being made?
To be honest, we don’t know for sure. Some researchers have suggested that, because it would have been associated with royalty, the answer may lie in the political upheaval that spelled the end of the Han Dynasty and the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period. Others have suggested that, since it may have been related to the kinds of work Taoists were doing making imitation jade, that when Taoism became less politically important, the work kind of stopped. Or it might be for a completely different reason altogether. Sometimes we don’t know for sure why things disappear, making not just the artifact, but the reason it disappeared, part of the mystery. So, in the end, there’s a lot of stuff that we might have forgotten how to do, like how a particular group of people brewed beer or carved musical instruments, for instance. And a lot of that we’ll probably never recover. But, over the past four examples, we’ve seen how careful analysis of historical records and samples, along with a bit of experimentation, can help us understand not just what past people were doing, but how and why. And by considering the question of why certain techniques were lost in the first place, we can see how different factors can affect technology. One way to keep from losing techniques is to keep notes and save them in a file. And if you’re worried about someone gaining access to your proprietary technique, the sponsor of this video, Linode, has you covered. With Linode, you’re the only person with the keys to gain administrator access to your server, which means you can trust them with your company’s private data. And they believe in open-source and open-cloud transparency. So not only will they keep your secrets safe, but they’re not keeping secrets from you either. Their cloud computing can help you store data online, host websites, create an online business, and more. Just check out the link in the description or head to linode.com/scishow. That link gives you a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow, and thank you to Linode for sponsoring this video. [♪ OUTRO]
History is full of things like personal histories, languages, and even whole technologies and techniques that we no longer remember. But one of the coolest things about archaeology is that it gives us a chance to re-learn things.
So here are four examples of really cool technology we kind of lost, how scientists are using modern techniques to study and re-learn them, and, ultimately, why these techniques nearly disappeared. One of the first examples of impressive ancient engineering is Roman concrete. Rome built some truly epic buildings, and many of them are still around today, like the Pantheon.
Roman concrete was incredibly durable, especially when we’re talking about its use in marine environments, like building harbors. Building something that can last thousands of years in wave-wracked seawater is truly impressive. But with the decline of the Roman empire, people seem to have more or less stopped using this super durable concrete on a wide scale. And for a long time, we didn’t really know what made this concrete so durable. I mean, we knew just a tiny bit. For instance, thanks to recipes recorded by people like Vitruvius, historians knew that the Romans used a different recipe than modern concrete.
Concrete, in general, is a mix of aggregates, like little bits of rocks or brick, water, and cement, and varying that recipe can change its physical properties. The Romans used a particularly involved mix of aggregate along with lime, seawater, and volcanic ash. But not just any ash: It was a special kind called pozzolana, which was dug up near Naples. This mix seems to be special, since people would actually pay to import this ash when they were building stuff.
But we didn’t know what actually made this mix special. In a study published in 2017, scientists decided to find out. They got samples in the form of long, cylindrical cores that had been drilled out of Roman ruins and then used a microscope and X-rays to look at the minerals inside. They found that the answer to the incredible durability of Roman concrete lies in the chemistry inherent in the concrete, in large part thanks to the mix of both seawater and that special volcanic ash.
Silica and aluminum oxide from the pozzolana reacts with lime and the seawater to create crystals of a mineral called tobermorite, which reinforces the concrete and makes it less likely to crack. Even better, further exposure to seawater causes the growth of more tobermorite, explaining why Roman concrete did so well in coastal projects. But if this was such cool tech, how did the whole world just kind of seemingly forget about it? Well, in this case, the answer partly has to do with demand. In short, with the collapse of the Roman empire, the nearby demand for this kind of mega-engineering went away. It no longer made sense to build quite as grandly or to pay for the special pozzolana to be dug up and shipped. With less demand, the knowledge of how to make this concrete started to fade away.
It didn’t entirely disappear, we have examples of engineers still reaching for pozzolana long after the Romans fell, but it may have become more of a trade secret or kind of oral memory rather than a codified recipe. It was only later, in the 1700s, that science kind of formally recognized and “re-discovered” it again. The moral is that technologies exist in context. When it made sense for Roman concrete to be widely used, it was. When it wasn’t, it faded into memory.
Speaking of being widely used, Roman concrete might make a further resurgence sometime soon. A number of scientists have suggested that the formula, or something similar to it using coal ash, might be a good candidate for marine uses today, and produce fewer carbon emissions. Now onto something softer…Dhaka muslin was a thin, high-quality fabric that came from what’s now Bangladesh. It had been produced for centuries before eventually becoming a big hit in Europe in the late 1700s. The material was made of a special variety of cotton that grew along the Meghna River, which had very short, easily frayed threads.
This made the material kind of a beast to work with and turning it into fabric required a convoluted, 16-step process that would have required multiple households. One step could only be done on boats, for instance, as the material needed to be a certain level of humidity. The payoff of all this work, however, was incredible.
The material was very light and thin. It was said that you could fit 18 meters of fabric into a pocket-sized snuff box and it could apparently reach thread counts around 800-1200 threads per square inch. But by the 1900s, it seems to have disappeared. So why’d we stop making it? In short, because the British East India Company or EIC made it impossible for farmers to make a profit off of it. In the 1700s and 1800’s, the EIC effectively took over large portions of India and started to muck with the system. One thing they did, for instance, was to put the farmers into terrible financial situations where it was really easy to go into irrecoverable debt.
In the meantime, British manufacturers flooded the market with inferior look-alikes. The end result was that the farmers, no longer able to make a stable living off it, abandoned the practice. And without people to continue growing it, the variety of cotton it was based on went extinct. By the 1900s Dhaka muslin was a thing of the past.
That said, scientists are trying to renew the industry. Luckily, the technique was written down, so we do know how to make it, but we still need that special cotton. And although it doesn’t grow anymore, we may be able to kind of recreate it. And it’s all thanks to leaves preserved at the Kew Gardens. Scientists could extract the DNA from those leaves and form a genetic signature for this plant. Then it was off to the races, they started a scavenger hunt for the closest wild plant near that one river and found one that’s a potential cousin or descendant.
Today, they've grown those plants and are making something close to the original garments again. So what can we learn from Dhaka muslin’s disappearance? Again, it kind of comes down to economics, but in this case, specifically, trade and colonialism were disrupting the industry. We can see this in other places too. The Haya in Africa had a unique way of making a very high-quality steel and were doing it long before many other people had the technology, but the technique was nearly lost in the 1900s when cheap European steel flooded the market. So, in both of the last two points, the answer for why something was lost kind of boiled down to economics.
Sometimes, however, techniques are lost because they were too secret to spread around… If you look at the history of warfare, one of the most mysterious and terrifying weapons ever invented in the past was probably Greek Fire. It was introduced by the Byzantine Greeks in the 600’s CE. And it was described as a liquid that was discharged through a tube or grenade, which could burn on water with thunderous noise and a lot of smoke. There have been many proposed explanations for what this liquid could be, but we don’t know exactly what it was because its identity was a secret. It was a military asset, so the people who knew how to make it probably didn’t want their enemies learning the process. Figuring out what it may have been generally boils down to meticulous research of existing historical records for clues and comparing proposed concoctions to see if they match the expected properties. For instance, people have proposed it’s based on saltpeter, kind of like an early gunpowder, but others think it was probably based on crude or refined petroleum, something like naphtha or napalm.
In this case, the people who made this stuff purposefully didn’t want a lot of people to know how it worked. It’s been suggested that it may have been whipped up in a central lab, sealed in containers, then delivered to the front lines. So soldiers using it wouldn’t have ever known exactly how it was made. Even if it was captured by the enemy, they wouldn’t know how to make it. It's also been suggested that it may have been pretty complicated to actually use and needed a whole system to make it work, like how to prep it, heat it, and use it. If true, it's plausible that the process could have been compartmentalized, so even if you knew part of the system, you still wouldn’t be able to figure it all out by yourself. But the secrecy meant that the knowledge of how to make this was tenuous. Some scholars suggest that only a small number of individuals understood the whole system at any one given time. And, eventually, as regimes were overturned and people died, the secret was lost. So the reason the tech was forgotten was mainly due to secrecy. And we can see this with a lot of proprietary or secret stuff, even today. In the early 2000s, there was apparently a bit of a snafu when the US military needed to refurbish their nukes, but there were problems figuring out how to get more of a substance code named “fogbank” because only a handful of records had survived and most of the folks who knew how to make it had retired. Now for something less terrifying.
Painted on some of the terracotta soldiers in China was an unusual, bright lavender pigment, which we now know as Han purple. An interesting feature because at the time it was being made, from around 800 BCE to 220 CE, purple and blue pigments were very rare. What’s more, you can’t find this specific pigment in nature; you have to make it.
So a vibrant purple pigment that far back in time is an incredible achievement, but Han purple didn’t stick around. Its usage died out with the end of the Han dynasty, around the early 200s CE, and it wasn’t rediscovered until the 1990s. When scientists first found the pigment, they didn’t know what exactly it was. There was no written record of how it was made, so scientists had to rely on experimentation and analysis to find out. To figure out what was in the stuff, scientists tried dissolving it in acid as well as using techniques like bombarding it with X-rays under a microscope, kind of like what the Roman concrete group did. Thanks to these techniques, they figured out that the purple is a compound that contains the elements like barium and copper along with silicon and oxygen bound to it. They then experimented and found that they could replicate it, or make something like it, by cooking a barium mineral, such as witherite or barite, with quartz, a copper mineral, and a lead salt. But it was a complicated technical feat …they needed scalding temperatures of around 1000 degrees Celsius, and had to keep up that heat for a long time.
This all raises the question, how the heck did the ancient scientists discover something this complicated? One suggestion is that it was the result of trade and cultural exchange, since it’s similar to another ancient synthetic pigment called Egyptian Blue, but the logistics here seem iffy. Egypt and China are not very close to each other geographically. Another option is that it was discovered by glass making or trying to create imitation jade. But why’d it stop being made?
To be honest, we don’t know for sure. Some researchers have suggested that, because it would have been associated with royalty, the answer may lie in the political upheaval that spelled the end of the Han Dynasty and the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period. Others have suggested that, since it may have been related to the kinds of work Taoists were doing making imitation jade, that when Taoism became less politically important, the work kind of stopped. Or it might be for a completely different reason altogether. Sometimes we don’t know for sure why things disappear, making not just the artifact, but the reason it disappeared, part of the mystery. So, in the end, there’s a lot of stuff that we might have forgotten how to do, like how a particular group of people brewed beer or carved musical instruments, for instance. And a lot of that we’ll probably never recover. But, over the past four examples, we’ve seen how careful analysis of historical records and samples, along with a bit of experimentation, can help us understand not just what past people were doing, but how and why. And by considering the question of why certain techniques were lost in the first place, we can see how different factors can affect technology. One way to keep from losing techniques is to keep notes and save them in a file. And if you’re worried about someone gaining access to your proprietary technique, the sponsor of this video, Linode, has you covered. With Linode, you’re the only person with the keys to gain administrator access to your server, which means you can trust them with your company’s private data. And they believe in open-source and open-cloud transparency. So not only will they keep your secrets safe, but they’re not keeping secrets from you either. Their cloud computing can help you store data online, host websites, create an online business, and more. Just check out the link in the description or head to linode.com/scishow. That link gives you a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow, and thank you to Linode for sponsoring this video. [♪ OUTRO]