5 Ancient Inventions That Were WAY Ahead Of Their Time | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org we like to think that history is an unbroken line of innovation in advancement but in fact these things rise and fall and sometimes there are huge leaps that just happened too early to make a difference archaeologists and historians have found numerous accounts of devices and technologies that were just way ahead of their time employing ideas that would take the rest of the world thousands of years to rediscover some of them made a meaningful impact on the ancient world some of them were so forgotten by time that there are total mystery to us now but they all kind of forced us to rethink what we know about the past and speculate about what could have been and here's five of them first up is an ancient steam engine the invention of the steam engine marked the turning point in human history before the steam engine all work was done by human or animal labor and there was only so much that you could do and progress was stalled but with the advent of the combustion engine first was steam and later with petroleum we were able to mechanize work at that point all bets were off the modern steam engine was invented in 1698 by Thomas Sabri although it would take another hundred years or so for that to become ubiquitous technology but once it did it changed the world and spurred on the Industrial Revolution just imagine if that technology was invented 2,000 years ago because guess what kind of was here on of Alexandria also known as hero was a mathematician and engineer in the 1st century AD and among other things he invented the first windmill the first pipe organ and yes a steam engine called the yellow pile that was a radial steam engine that consisted of a boiler with two pipes that led up to a sphere with two tip Jets or nozzles facing in opposite directions then a fire was lit under the cauldron which made the water evaporate steam rose up through the pipes into the rotating chamber which spun at dazzling speed sadly the y'all pile was never considered anything more than just a novelty a doohickey if you will it was something he used to entertain the King in the court some even considered a sort of a kid's toy why didn't they see its potential why didn't this spur on an ancient industrial revolution where's my jetpack well for one reason that device spins nicely but it doesn't really generate a lot of torque so it's not very useful as a source of power but even if they were able to make it into a source of power fuel would be an issue keep in mind this was long before they knew about cold the only source of fuel that they had was wood and this was Alexandria Egypt not exactly in the middle of a rainforest also you've got to keep in mind that manual labor back then was done by slaves and as awful as this sounds slaves were kind of expendable to them so they just didn't see a need to automate anything and besides the lack of power that this thing put out actually the amount of slave labor required just to keep the thing fueled would be more than you would be getting out of the engine so it just made more sense to have the slave do whatever labor the engine could do just one more way that slavery blocked the progress of the human race it could also be argued that 1700 years later when the Industrial Revolution got its start we were already kind of primed for understanding that type of power because we had mastered wind mills and water mills and we were able to you know use that whereas back in the ancient world they didn't have that understanding already so they had no way of making that connection next up is the Baghdad battery this one is controversial to say the least the Baghdad battery was a clay jar found near the village of kazoo true boon near Baghdad in the 1930s it was dated to sometime between 250 BCE and 250 seee also known as the Parthian period now clay jars from that time period are all over the place that was pretty much the vessel they used to store pretty much anything from liquids like wine and vinegar to Scrolls to keep them safe from the environment but this particular jar was unusual it featured an asphalt stopper at the top through which there was a length of iron bar and on the inside of the jar the iron bar was surrounded by a copper cylinder and the inside of the jar was covered with an acidic resin and this led the German anthropologist will hem Kanak to suppose that maybe it was an ancient battery a galvanic cell that they could use to do electroplating a technique that wasn't possible into the 1840s it's not the craziest idea if you look at the construction of it if you filled it with some kind of electrolyte like grape juice lemon juice or vinegar something like that you could conceivably get some kind of electricity out of it in fact the Mythbusters built the recreation of it and they were able to get one point one volts out of it and that's cool but it's not a lot you would need two of these to run a digital watch so the only way these batteries could really be useful is if you strung a whole bunch of them together which doesn't seem possible because it was only one of them that was found and they also didn't find any wires or connecting devices that would have made another theory is that they could use this to elicit sort of a religious experience like they would connect this battery to a statue a metal statue featuring an idol of a god that somebody wanted to connect with and when they touched it they would feel that jolt and it would be like them connecting with the god of the statue or it might have been used in a medicinal sense they could have felt that that tiny electrical jolt had some kind of healing properties or maybe it was just a curiosity like the yollop I'll just a an experiment that somebody came up with that they didn't really understand or it's always possible it was just another clay pot that happened to be constructed differently and it's been completely misunderstood basically we have no way of knowing if they had any idea what this battery could do why it did what it did or if they used it for anything at all by the way just add a little coda to this story if you'd like to go see the Baghdad battery in person you can't because nobody knows where it is it was actually looted from the National Museum in 2003 when the u.s. invaded Baghdad and has never been seen since this thing just can't stop giving us mysteries to solve next up is Damascus steel around the year 1095 Europe got all crusade II the Catholic Church under pope urban ii sent waves of soldiers to the holy land to try to reclaim it from the muslims that currently occupied it when they got there they found themselves fighting against soldiers using the most remarkable steel they'd ever seen in their lives and I called it Damascus steel it was said to have almost mythical properties it could slice a feather in half in midair but was still strong enough to run through somebody's armor like it was aluminum foil and it was also beautiful it was like made of all these wavy dark and light patterns all over it they named it Damascus steel because I first encountered it in Syria but it's actually made out of a type of steel that comes from India called boots the armors that Forge Damascus steel they kept the secret of how they made it very close to their chests nobody knows exactly how they took this wootz steel from India and transformed it into a Damascus steel there are some things that we know some sound more like legend than others the steel was made strong by repeatedly heating it and then quenching it in some kind of liquid legends say that they quenched it in dragon's blood because of course they did some said that they quenched it in the urine of a redheaded boy and then others said that you had to use three-day-old urine from a three-year-old goat that had been eating nothing but ferns if you ask me that was the prank that some Syrian was playing on the Crusaders but the most metal version says that they quenched the sword by thrusting it into the body of a muscular slave and then the strength of that slave would transfer into the steel damn son studies by modern scientists have concluded that the carbon content in Damascus steel was actually higher than most types of steel so it's thought that it was forged with charcoal and wood ash all this extra carbon when forged with a moderate temperature around 1700 degrees Fahrenheit would turn into carbide which basically made it three atoms of iron to one atom of carbon this gave the great strength but not enough for it to be brittle now there are some modern processes that have been able to sort of emulate Damascus steel but we're still not exactly sure how they did it back then with their technology there are some pieces of Damascus steel some original Damascus steel laying around but they are very rare and expensive number four is Greek fire in 1942 at Harvard University chemist Louis Fieser led a team working for the United States chemical warfare division it helped come up with new and innovative ways to kill people with science they came up with an incendiary substance that burned like gasoline but was sticky and gooey and stuck to what ever you flung it on it was like glue from hell it was a combination of fuel and a gelling substance made up of co precipitated salt naphthenic and palmitic acids also known as napalm it was first used in world war ii but really came into its own during the Korean and Vietnam wars this was an innovation in human warfare but it wasn't the first time the world had seen it because in the year 760 - the Byzantine people of the city of Constantinople came under siege by Arab forces run by the Umayyad caliphate and a couple of years into this siege the arab naval blockade was suddenly surprised to see a whole bunch of boats floating toward them so they moved in to engage the byzantine boats and when they did the Byzantines opened up a can of whoop-ass a stream of unholy fire shot out of the Byzantine ships and torched the Arab something they had never seen before they had no idea what they were dealing with here witnesses said that it actually set the air on fire even jumping in the water wasn't an escape because this stuff burned on the top of the water which means it was impossible to put it out it was an absolute rout of the naval blockade which finally ended the siege and put an end to the war temporarily this insane weapon became known as the Greek fire because the Byzantines were the descendants of the Greeks into this day nobody knows how they did it it continued to be used by the Byzantines for a couple of centuries and they even figured out how to make grenades out of it so they could use it in land battles and eventually their enemies did figure out some ways to actually put out this fire it usually involves sand vinegar and old urine so basically the Byzantines forced their enemies to carry old urine with them on their boats that's just trolling level 1000 some of the ingredients were thought to be using the great fire were petroleum lime Neider and sulfur and it was actually able to be pumped and aimed with one hand but eventually the secrets of the Greek fire and the tactics that involved it were lost to history and not rediscovered until the 20th century so the world got to experience a nice millennia there without people getting incinerated alive by flaming gak and last but not least is the Antikythera mechanism the island of Antikythera in greece also pronounced Antikythera sometimes was a jagged little island made up of jagged coral reefs and jagged volcanic outcrops we're a very non jagged boat could meet a very jagged end and I just broke the world record for the number of time where jagged as used in one sentence so wasn't too much of a surprise in 1902 when a fisherman was diving for sponges and found the remains of an old ship that had run aground the ship was determined to be from about 70 BCE and actually contained a treasure trove of statues and art that were in really good condition but amongst all the naked stone people was a weird little device full of gears and gadgets that they'd never seen anything like before and they became known as the Antikythera mechanism it was just this massive corroded bronze gears that fit inside the remains of a wooden box that was about thirty four by nineteen by nine centimeters and it's completely confounded archaeologists for the better part of a century some early researchers thought that it might have been an early analogue computer but that was mostly blown off because that was just way too advanced for that time period it was dated to be around a generation of when the ship records of 70 BCE although some people put it all the way back to 250 BCE but more research including a high-resolution x-ray tomography scan that gave us the look at the inner workings that we'd never seen before the prevailing wisdom changed and yeah it was a computer the device contains 37 gears used to trace the motion of the moon planets and stars through the zodiac solar eclipses and even factors in their regular orbit of the moon taking account of the different speed of the moon - the pair agree in the effigy they've also discovered a back face that actually kept track of the Olympic Games it worked on a geocentric model of the solar system which was the prevailing wisdom at the time and operated them both khalipa and metonic calendars which work on 76 year and 19 year cycles respectively these were early calendars that were created in Athens around 300 BCE what's interesting about this device well one of the things that's interesting about this device is that it was the only one that was found so we don't know whether or not this was an actual tool used by sailors for navigation or if it was just a novelty like other things on this list the writer Cicero actually mentioned device similar to this in some of his writings but this was the only one that was ever found but one thing is clear this level of accuracy and complexity is something that was completely lost to history and not rediscovered until the master European clog makers in the 14th century so how did we lose these things how does progress and technology come to a screeching halt or maybe the better question is how does technology evolved in the first place how did electricity steam locomotion and mechanization all come together at the same time to create the Industrial Revolution and why didn't those dots connect back in the ancient world we look back on history and all of this seems inevitable but it wasn't little pockets of innovation and technology bubbled up all over the place throughout history but they never came together to really change things maybe in the case of the last couple hundred years we just got extraordinarily lucky although I'd argue that luck had a little to do with it because it was another revolution that took place that made all these others come together and that was a revolution of the mind the Enlightenment science as a process that we use to discover the truth is only something that really took root around the 18th century really getting started around 1685 but it was only because we had this foundation of the scientific process and peer review that all these different innovations were able to come together to start up the Industrial Revolution which led to the computer revolution to bring us to where we are right now only three hundred years later it's heartbreaking in a way you know what if we gotten this lucky 2,000 years ago what if the Enlightenment had occurred around 100 BCE and then had a little Industrial Revolution around the year 100 and then computers came about in the year 300 I mean where would we be now like literally what planet would we be on it's an interesting thought exercise tell me what you think in the comments of course we can't go back and change that all we can do is just look forward and do 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 790,878

Rating: 4.91606 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, ancient inventions, greek fire, napalm, flamethrower, byzantines, constantinople, baghdad battery, Antikythera Mechanism, ancient computer, Hero of Alexandria, Hero's engine, steam engine, industrial revolution, damascus steel, crusades, ancient greece

Id: 5FmZ0z49Dgs

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2018