Oh probe the lost secrets of ancient technology from airplanes to computers brain surgery to weapons of war breakthroughs created thousands of years before their time [Music] in the beginning he seemed so unlike a god a vulnerable creature at first barely human naked alone afraid but one who would one day rule the earth [Music] as his humaneness emerged what inner longing what passion compelled early man to create to invent to utterly transform his world [Music] perhaps one of his earliest discoveries helped to Kindle his imagination when man found fire it meant that he could actually put a barrier between himself and his greatest enemy which is darkness he could actually have Worth and light around him which perhaps gave him the opportunity to think perhaps even to think abstract thoughts from fire to the wheel to the first forms of writing ancient technology evolved over tens of thousands of years we have struggled to give expression to our innate genius for invention and yet today when we look back only 2,000 years we perceive our ancestors as primitive [Music] but were they we seem to have this notion that simply because we have obtained the level of sophistication that we we have that in the past people were somehow intellectually inferior to us in fact in a great many case as the reverse is true we are in many ways considerably less sophisticated than our predecessors [Music] was the ancient mind more advanced in its thinking than we have ever imagined could such supposedly modern breakthroughs as steam power the computer the electrical battery and the submarine have been conceived hundreds even thousands of years before their time [Music] the quest for flight has long been viewed as a twentieth-century breakthrough but to some this ancient object discovered in a tomb near Saqqara Egypt is evidence that the Egyptians experimented with aerodynamic principles over 2,000 years ago this is assumed to be a bird by Egyptologists because it has wings however the shape of the wings is unlike the shape of any known bird wing as a matter of fact the the wings are tilted down slightly at a that's what's called a dihedral angle they have an aerofoil section like the section of a modern aircraft wing it has a perfectly upright tail no bird known to science has such a tail actually what it looks like is a model of an airplane other scientists however strongly disagree it has been suggested that the Saqqara bird represents an early flying machine maybe it was a hand launch glider or maybe it was even a model some people have suggested for a larger aircraft I don't think that's the case [Music] the controversy over what the Saqqara glider really represents continues [Music] but even the most skeptical scientists now concede that ancient inventors achieved some astonishing feats of technology which cannot be equal today Damascus steel first created over 2000 years ago the making of Damascus steel is still a mystery because we really don't know exactly how it was done there is a definite recipe for it but we really are not sure what that recipe is and although we've been able to reproduce Steel's that are similar to Damascus steel we have never been able to reproduce it perfectly in the hands of fierce Saracen warriors swords forged from this high carbon metal carved a bloody swath through the early Crusaders in the Holy Land the strength and cutting power of this tempered steel blade from a technology over a thousand years old has not been duplicated even in the space-age [Music] it is only one of the lost secrets of ancient technology [Music] what we have seen in this century is the most incredible explosion and development of technology but what we have to take into account is that technology is not a linear development we have technology being invented rising to a very sophisticated level and then suddenly we plunge back down into a dark age where most of it gets lost [Applause] tragically throughout history barbarism has threatened to destroy priceless treasures of human knowledge [Music] perhaps the greatest crime ever committed in the ancient world was the willful destruction of these extraordinary buildings in Alexandria Egypt [Music] the legendary Library of Alexandria was a treasure trove holding the accumulated secrets of centuries of ancient technology [Music] starting in the year 48 BC this monument to human inventive genius would be ravaged by a series of disastrous fires set first by the Roman legions then by Christian and Muslim conquerors no one knows what priceless secrets may have gone up in smoke lost to mankind forever we have a tendency as a as a species to willfully obliterate whole areas of our past - to wipe clean the memory banks of mankind and the Library of Alexandria is an example of this who knows what it contained or what it told about the human story all we really know about the contents of the Library of Alexandria now comes down to us from scholars who studied there and everything indicates that it was an extraordinary repository of information completely lost to the world [Music] it is impossible to say how the wisdom it contained might have transformed our past our present and our future if this ancient reservoir of world knowledge had survived [Music] only now our scientists finally unearthing the lost secrets of ancient technology inventions before their time hidden for hundreds even thousands of years [Music] the wonders of ancient technology how were they conceived were some created after painstaking years of trial and error others in a single blinding flash of genius surprisingly modern scholars believe that many early breakthroughs were ignored in their own time never pursued or developed their vast potential was lost for centuries only hundreds of years later have these forgotten innovations been unearthed by a twist of fate [Music] the shifting desert sands of Iraq near the timeless ancient city of Baghdad here in 1936 Wilhelm Koenig an Austrian scientist made a discovery which would challenge long-held assumptions about ancient technology when the archaeologists discovered this object he looked at it and it looked to him like a battery in fact it's very difficult to see what else it could be it is a small pottery jar with a copper tube hung down the middle and an iron rod suspended in the middle of the copper tube the artifact was discovered in a site that is pretty clearly to be dated to the 1st century AD [Music] was it possible that an ancient inventor had constructed an electrical battery [Music] now there has been some controversy about what could they have been using a battery for in the first century AD and furthermore there's been some controversy about how on earth could they have discovered the dime thing my own view of how people could have managed to discover the principle embodied in the Baghdad battery already in the first century AD is in fact very simple it is that any two dissimilar metals in this case copper and iron when put in a liquid that is acidic will generate a voltage between them but what was the battery's purpose some scientists have speculated that current from the Baghdad battery might have been used to electroplate silver objects with a patina of gold but other scholars disagree the artifact was found in a house that is clearly a magicians house there were bowls there with magical inscriptions in them and we know that in Mesopotamia in ancient Mesopotamia the people who were in charge of medicine the doctors were the magicians and therefore my hypothesis is that this magician was of course a doctor and he was using this battery as something medical but what possible medical purpose might an electrical battery have served two millennia ago even in modern times people use electrical current as a kind of painkiller device well this could have been done in antiquity to support his theory professor Keizer found an intriguing clue in a bizarre practice of the ancient world along the Mediterranean and the Nile River a rare breed of electrical fish called torpedo was raised for an unusual purpose when a person suffered from physical pain he would wade into waters stocked with the fish their mild electrical shocks would provide a tingling to help ease the pain we have a first century AD Latin text by a man named scarboni oz who actually describes how to cure pain in your legs by taking a living electric fish on the beach and standing on it so the principle that this kind of tingling would have cured pain was well known is valid it's used in modern times and I think it's not so hard to see why an ancient Mesopotamian doctor magician would have made use of this to alleviate pain beyond the debate over the battery's purpose lies an even more provocative question who was the inventor who created it in his wildest imaginings he could not have conceived how the magic of electricity would someday transform the world [Music] as mysterious as the creation of the Baghdad battery was why it was suddenly abandoned not to be reinvented until 1900 years later he's unknown while some lost secrets of ancient technology are buried beneath scorching desert sands others lie entombed in the uncharted waters of the sea in 1900 a sponge diver off the Greek island of Antikythera found the wreck of an ancient ship loaded with precious statues and ceramics it had lain undisturbed for over 2,000 years called the first great underwater find of modern archaeology its cargo of priceless marble and bronze statues were recognized at once as the work of Greek artisans from the time of Jesus [Music] but one puzzling object baffled scientists this seemingly worthless barnacle-encrusted hunk of bronze had split into four fragments which revealed beard wheels adorned with barely legible inscriptions [Music] the discovery languished forgotten in the basement of a Greek Museum for another half century then in 1951 an American historian professor Derek de sola price of Yale became fascinated with the enigmatic object [Music] in 1971 price received permission from the Greek government to x-ray the device [Music] at last he gazed at the site he had waited 20 years to see a sophisticated instrument which price called an ancient Greek computer it had been designed to calculate the motions of the Sun the Moon and stars past present and future with amazing accuracy to achieve its complex astronomical computations the device relied on an impressive array of differential gears ingeniously assembled to create the world's first analog computer some lost secrets of ancient technology are not buried beneath the desert sands or in the depths of the sea they have vanished simply because the inventor and his society never grasped its potential to transform the world the mid 1st century AD an engineer named Hiro or in Greek Heron invented a number of very clever devices one of which has been called the steam engine you put water in the kettle you boil the water the steam rises up through the tube goes into the ball and comes out the tube bent tubes and the thing will spin around in fact it will spin around very rapidly modern models show that it will spin around at about a thousand to 1500 rotations per minute [Music] if hero had combined the principle of this primitive steam engine with other concepts which he had already developed he might have built the world's first steam locomotive perhaps even launched the modern industrial age professor Kaiser has an even more intriguing theory my answer is that he wasn't in fact building a steam engine this was not designed to be a power source but he was showing by having the steam jet out of this thing and having it spin around that you could actually make something move without pushing against anything but it really was was a demonstration of the principle of the jet or rocket whether Hiro had stumbled upon the steam engine or the beginnings of jet propulsion if he had followed through he might have launched the Industrial Revolution 1,800 years before its time [Music] but what if these brilliant early inventions had been pursued rather than abandoned if the Greeks had developed the steam engine perhaps a European Explorer might have discovered America centuries before Columbus using steam ships instead of sailing vessels if the analog computer of Greek times had sparked the continued development of such sophisticated devices then by the 16th century Shakespeare might have been writing his plays on a computer instead of with equivalent Adana Dirac had been refined for generations instead of being forgotten our own technology might be vastly more advanced than it is today perhaps the reason these discoveries of ancient technology were never pursued says less about their brilliant inventors than it does about the shortsightedness of those around them for an ancient times and our own quantum leaps into the future are only possible if the human imagination will expand to accept them [Music] throughout the world all inspiring monuments of stone bear witness to the genius of ancient architects and engineers and blooming as large as these megaliths are the riddles of their construction the Pyramids of Giza to see them rising out of the desert is to experience wonder the techniques which built the most massive monuments on earth are a riddle which has never truly been solved [Music] believed to have been created almost 5000 years ago each pyramid is said to have taken 30 years to construct the pyramids are thought to have been built by the lifelong toil of untold thousands and yet as with almost everything regarding these awesome structures there is controversy the whole idea of thousands of slaves hauling blocks up ramps to build the pyramids is I mean that that's a fine theory but there's really no evidence from any Egyptian texts or depictions of people building pyramids this way the pyramids have been studied perhaps more than any other ancient monument on earth yet scholars still cannot say how the stones were moved to construct them these blocks weigh 200 tons each now to put that into perspective 200 tons is roughly equivalent in weight to 500 modern family sized automobiles but biggest cranes in the world can lift 200 ton blocks but it takes six weeks to move those cranes into position for a single lift and each block would require a relocation of the crane you're looking at years dozens perhaps hundreds of years of work with modern cranes to put those temples into place and yet we're told by Egyptologists that they were built purely with manual labour however the stones were brought to the building site scholars agree the ancient Egyptians then faced an even more formidable task how could these enormous blocks of stone be lifted 20 30 even 40 stories above the ground the answer to this question still eludes scholars to this day a French structural engineer by the name of Joseph Davidowitz as a whole theory that the main blocks of say the Great Pyramid were actually poured into place much like concrete now the interior of the Great Pyramid for instance is built out of blocks of granite and these are blocks astons would have to be quarried but the bulk of the pyramid itself is made of this very sort of crumbly conglomerate stone which he claims is a form of concrete and therefore in the building of the pyramids we have an ingeniously simple technique [Music] without modern measuring instruments how did the builders of the Great Pyramid achieve such an astounding degree of accuracy these ancients were looking at the Stars and very precisely aligning their monuments to the Stars the characteristic of the ease of sight is extreme precision what we would really call today high-tech precision the Great Pyramid of Egypt stands more than 450 feet tall it weighs more than six million tons and it has a footprint in excess of 13 acres it's perfectly aligned to true north south east and west to achieve that precision of alignment with a monument on this scale is an extraordinary technological feat for thousands of years we have gazed at them in wonder and yet their secrets still remain [Music] as puzzling as the riddle of the pyramids construction is the technological achievement of ancient cultures in the new world for in South America there exists a feat of ancient technology which rivals the pyramids of Egypt as a testament to engineering genius [Music] while the Egyptian pyramids proclaimed their splendor to the world the very existence of the Lost Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru was deliberately kept secret for centuries to protect it from hostile invaders [Music] the exact purpose of machu picchu like the secrets of the technology that built it remains controversial to this day the awesome challenge of construction which the Egyptians set for themselves at sea level the peoples of the ancient Inca Empire somehow had to achieve at the altitude of nine thousand feet to achieve the formidable feat of constructing Machu Picchu the Inca had to move stones weighing as much as 200 tons in a superhuman test of physical stamina in the thin air of the high Andes what made the creation of machu picchu possible it may have been an ingenious technology which we do not yet comprehend while there is evidence for ramps to bring stones up along a wall and into position there are many places where there is no room for such ramps because the walls are very close to precipices so I really don't know how the stones were brought there after moving the gigantic stones up the steep mountainside the Incas were somehow capable of cutting and fitting them together precisely without the use of mortar of any kind but there are a few structures that exhibit incredible stonework really fantastic strikes one by its precision how stones of irregular shape are fit together with precision that not even a razor blade can be put in between [Music] as puzzling as the precision of the stone work is the question of why it was created [Music] scholars speculate that the site may have been a summer retreat for the Emperor of the Incas and his court but the massive stones of Machu Picchu remain silent [Music] in the quest for the lost secrets of the ancient master builders perhaps the ultimate riddle lies 400 miles to the southeast of Machu Picchu at the altitude of over 12,000 feet in the high Andes here in Bolivia on a windswept plain lie the ruins known as Tiahuanaco [Music] almost nothing is known of its mysterious creators who some believe lived here as early as fourteen thousand years ago even their name is lost in the shadows of time the monumental gateway of the Sun is carved from a single massive block of volcanic rock weighing more than 150 tons amazingly the quarry from which it was cut is nearly 200 miles away the biggest blocks at Giza weigh 200 tons the biggest blocks of tihuanaco weigh 400 tons 400 ton blocks of stone used to create enormous constructions twelve and a half thousand feet above sea level in an area where it's almost not possible to grow any food today the altitude is so high that the crops come out of the ground stunted you could not support ever a large labor force at that altitude and no large labor force on earth would be capable of hauling 400 ton blocks again whether we like it or not we're looking at the evidence of a technology and one that we don't understand even more impressive than the weight of the stones used in construction was the technology holding them together for the builders conceived an ingenious invention to lock the stones into place pouring molten metal into small molds they created braces which bear a resemblance to modern staples what was the source of the technology which made the monuments of Tiahuanaco possible inexplicably unlike both the Egyptians and the Incas these master builders left no written records for the ages but a single enigmatic statue known to the local inhabitants today as the friar may hold a clue oddly enough for a people who had no form of the written word the friar seems to be holding an object in the familiar shape of a book complete with leather binding and metal latches could this be a depiction of a benevolent leader who somehow in the distant past imparted secrets of technology to the people of the high Andes [Music] from Machu Picchu to Tiahuanaco and perhaps other lost sites yet undiscovered vast monuments across the world stand as astonishing and enduring evidence of the prowess of ancient technology [Music] the pompe Colorado the red plane of Peru it has not rained in this remote and hostile desert for over 10,000 years this is the ancestral domain of an ancient and long-forgotten people known as the Nazca Indians here they are ancient tombs from the time of Jesus once contained precious pottery exquisite gold jewelry elaborate weaving and the mummified remains of their honored dead the treasures have been looted by grave robbers desecrated by the ravages of time when the Nazca ruled over the land they were a fierce people headhunters who wore the decapitated heads of their slain enemies as trophies [Music] yet surprisingly these warlike people were also pioneers on the frontiers of ancient technology [Music] when modern scientists discovered these skulls they were forced to reach a startling conclusion 2,000 years ago the Nazca people were performing brain surgery [Music] I think it's extraordinary that people really did do brain surgery 2,000 years ago and we know they did because the the skulls still exist with the wounds completely healed scientists believe the ancient Nazca people performed delicate surgical operations on the brain not for ritual purposes but for purely medical reasons over 1,000 skulls have been unearthed at Nazca showing unmistakable proof that the Peruvian surgeons used precision instruments for these operations [Music] but as remarkable as these archaeological findings is the mystery to be found above ground at Nazca here inscribed on the desert floor is one of the most spectacular creations of ancient technology known as the Nazca lines what you see in Nazca is huge it's on it's on a vast scale it's it's on such a scale that's so large that you can't see it all lines at Nazca go actually for hundreds of miles straight through the Andes you see a vast array of different figures animal figures such as birds and spiders and killer whales you see large trapezoid figures intersecting these animal figures and the more you look at Nazca the more puzzling it becomes [Music] the Nazca lines have been called the largest work of art on earth though their true purpose remains a source of intense controversy all that is certain is that the Nazca Indians moved millions of stones to create the mysterious lines which cover an area of 200 square miles by stripping a top layer of stones to bare the lighter soil beneath the nazgûl created their masterpiece [Music] so vast was the technological achievement of the Nazca lines that it was ironically lost for centuries and only was discovered when airplanes began flying over the desert in the 1920s since then the lines have attracted researchers from around the world attempting to decipher their enigmatic riddles one of the most notable researchers was German scientist Maria Reich who first saw the Nazca lines in 1940 you can see the lines are absolutely straight that people have wondered very often how they ancient people could do these straight lines without any engineering instruments for the next 50 years until her death in 1991 Maria Reiche study of the lines became an obsession and as she relentlessly probed the timeless mystery the woman whom the local people called The Witch of the lines conceived a provocative theory Maria Reiche EES theories were largely that Nazca was a giant astronomical astrological observatory and many of the animal figures would be identified with zodiacal signs for instance similarly other lines that are intersecting these figures have to do with directions of stars and astronomical alignments that kind of thing but there's a lot more to Nazca than that the fundamental question remains why was this enigmatic achievement carved into the desert if it could only be seen from the air now there's certain explanations for that one is that the gods were to view the lines and therefore the people never were able to view them from the air another interesting idea is that the lines were made for shaman's to view and that these Peruvian shamans were ingesting hallucinogenic cactus for instance and then would be astrally launched spiritually over the plains [Music] searching for more down-to-earth answers archeologists have discovered intriguing clues buried in the dusty soil of the plain artifacts that seemingly depict people in flight in hot-air balloons [Music] mummy's wearing garments of exquisite fabric were also exhumed so sophisticated was the technology of this weaving that the fabrics unique combination of light weight and tensile strength have scarcely been duplicated to this day [Music] scientists wondered were these durable textiles and the ancient depictions of balloons in flight missing links in the riddle of the lines perhaps the ancients intended that the Nazca lines be viewed from a primitive hot-air balloon fashioned from this light but resilient fabric American archaeologist named Jim Woodman and his crew built a a balloon a hot-air balloon out of local materials they made a reed boat they used some of the Peruvian woven fabrics to create a hot-air balloon and they successfully flew over the Nazca plain in the cold dawn of July 6th 1967 Woodman and Julian not lifted off in an attempt to recreate the technique of ancient flight it was perhaps achieved by the Nazca Indians 1,000 years before the first hot-air balloon was ever invented in Europe [Music] indeed it's perfectly possible that people could have made the lines to be seen by the gods to be seen by their own ancestors or maybe even of course to have been seen themselves when they finally went to heaven there's no question that the people of Nazca a thousand years ago could have built hot air balloon and could have flown it whether they did that is still indeed a mystery an ancient people possibly capable of flight monumental earth structures visible only from the air ingredients of a historical detective story but one with very few clues a scrap of fabric a drawing on a shattered urn no matter why the lines were built the colossal labor of the Nazca Indians remains an enduring legacy of ancient technology Europe in the tenth century [Music] it was a world gripped by fear and ignorance pestilence and illiteracy superstition and bloody warfare between the first millennium after the death of Jesus and the 1300s Europe was beset by multiple catastrophes victims of the Black Death were buried as fast as graves could be dug in this bleak world science medicine and technology were seen as being in direct conflict with Christianity [Music] Western Europe was mired in the dark ages and the haunted landscape of the medieval mind [Music] yet half a world away there was a startlingly different universe [Music] he who paints in bright colors cannot use his brush here creation alone leaves the masterpiece Emperor with son 1100 of the Common Era China [Music] it's civilization reaches back over 3,000 years yet paradoxically this ancient kingdom would nurture technological achievements which scholars today consider surprisingly modern [Music] while European surgeons were bleeding people to death in the false hope of curing them of the plague the Chinese had already unlocked the secret of inoculation against disease [Music] but it wasn't only medecine where the Chinese created inventions far ahead of their time from the fishing pole and the umbrella to the suspension bridge the Chinese had solved a myriad of technological problems far before the West [Music] for scholars of ancient technology China presents an intriguing puzzle an isolated civilization making daring innovations far ahead of the rest of the world China developed independently of the rest of the world and that gives us a fascinating comparison point china is an ancient civilization unlike the civilization of ancient Egypt it never broke down went away and collapsed and went through a Dark Age so we have got a very long record of continuous Chinese civilization [Music] if necessity is the mother of invention perhaps curiosity is its father 200 years before the birth of Christ the first Chinese emperor g'wan D became obsessed with discovering the secret of life itself he believed himself to be a God and wanted to ensure that he would live forever he scoured the countryside for wise men and magicians who might unlock the riddle of everlasting life g'wan D never found the answer but his quest for knowledge established a tradition in China which continued for over 1,000 years what happened was that Chinese alchemists were engaged in a long search for elixir of immortality medicines that would make you live forever and in the course of investigating some of the interesting substances that they come across particularly potassium nitrate saltpeter they made certain mixtures which they found had very strange properties one text of the 9th century AD detailed one mixture with sulfur saltpeter and honey and says this is one of a number of recipes that you must never make ironically Alchemist seeking the formula for eternal life found instead a substance destined to kill untold millions of people for the Chinese alchemists had unwittingly discovered gunpowder gunpowder was already in use in Chinese armies in the 11th century AD when people in Europe was still suddenly hitting one another over the head with clubs and stabbing one another with swords and spears using their new discovery the Chinese developed rudimentary guns but then surprisingly never developed them further some scholars believe it was China's isolation from surrounding countries that accounts for this mystery it wasn't until Chinese gunpowder weapons reach Europe during the Middle Ages they began to be put under the kind of pressure for development that you only get when several countries have all got gunpowder weapons and they're all desperately trying to get the drop on everybody else whereas in China the pressure for development of the weapons beyond a certain point of adequacy it was not there although the emperor equipped his army with gunpowder weapons the new invention was used by the Chinese primarily for their own enjoyment during a fireworks festival honoring Emperor Li soon in 1264 one firework misfired instead of heading for the stars it sped directly at the Emperor's family witnessing this mishap an ingenious Chinese inventor saw an application that was far removed from entertainment when arrows were attached to fireworks tubes filled with gunpowder it was found they could travel over 1,000 yards he had invented the rocket precursors to the destructive weapons of the Second World War and the fearsome missiles of the nuclear age incredibly technology pioneered by the ancient Chinese has taken us to the moon and back in the sophisticated court of the Emperor's Palace a spoon laid upon a bronze plate had the power to literally change the world magicians and conjurors in the Emperor's inner circle used the device in the art of geomancy or Fung Shui the supernatural Chinese study of aligning dwellings harmoniously with the magnetic currents of the Earth's surface [Music] the spoon made of magnetic lodestone was spun on the plate and its motions examined closely the plate was divided into north south east and west [Music] 300 years before the birth of Jesus the Chinese had invented the compass [Music] it is a mystery to scholars that although the Chinese developed the compass for use in magic they did not at first use it as a tool of navigation [Music] meanwhile in Europe without the compass adventurers had launched an age of exploration using only the stars as their guide in medieval Europe religion was often at odds with technology yet in China religion hastened the development of technology especially the art of printing printing was invented in China and Exploited centuries before it was used in the West in Buddhism there's an immense store of Merit attached to somebody who passes on or copies or freely distributes one of the Buddhist scriptures the earliest printed text in the world was a Buddhist charm scroll printed in the year 704 ad at that time in Europe the common man was largely illiterate by the 10th century printing had exploded in China as books of all sorts were published in millions the generation of printed text in ancient China is immense it is the land of the book whereas in the West a scholar would have to before Hooten burg copy out books if he wanted them in China he went to a book shop when you bought Johann Gutenberg has long been credited with inventing movable type in Germany in 1458 it had in fact been invented over 400 years earlier by the Chinese in the 17th century Francis Bacon was writing about the great discoveries that made his world different from the world of the Greeks and Romans and he named three great inventions printing the magnetic compass and gunpowder the origins of which she said are obscure and inglorious the thing he didn't know was in fact they are all Chinese inventions and they had all reached Europe during the Middle Ages [Music] but over the centuries the Chinese themselves became as ignorant as the west of their ancestors glorious achievements why with all their inventive genius did they not fully develop many of their greatest discoveries perhaps the answer lies in the structure of Chinese society itself this huge futile bureaucratic structure left little room for innovation it wasn't the sort of structure that welcomed new ideas and change so in many ways the the underdeveloped and fragmented nature of Europe sometimes gave it a head start in making use of Chinese inventions from the 17th century onwards the Chinese became increasingly dazzled by European technological expertise when the Chinese were shown a mechanical clock by Jesuit missionaries they were awestruck the Chinese had forgotten that it was they who had invented mechanical clocks in the first place a thousand years earlier [Music] lost in the vast uncharted oceans of time some of the most remarkable achievements of ancient technology can be found in some of the most inaccessible places on earth here overgrown by the vines of a primeval mangrove swamp lies one of the great question marks of ancient technology [Music] on a remote Pacific island in Micronesia but a thousand miles northeast of New Guinea an island known as pontipee is what is probably the 8th wonder of the world the people of the island call this forbidden place nan made all the city of the gods they are reluctant to set foot here for they fear the spirits haunting the ominous grandeur which surrounds them who could have possibly created it totally uninhabited the Islanders who live on pontipee Island are are afraid to go to this city and they believe that if they do go there and they will die it's like a city of the Dead and it's reported by people who live near at at night that they see lights moving through the city scholars believe nan made all was built over 1500 years ago as if the challenge of its construction was not formidable enough the city was built on a series of 92 man-made islands [Music] to achieve this colossal feat hundreds of thousands of gigantic stone logs made of basalt were stacked together and then filled with tons of coral rubble the result from an estimated 250 million tons of basalt rose a city which covers 11 square miles the Irish seamen who discovered this lost world in 1828 refused to believe it could have been created by the primitive fishermen who had lived there in grass huts on the island of Pohnpei for centuries today scholars theorize that nan Madol was somehow built by the Islanders themselves for an elite dynasty of rulers the most persistent mystery about inanimate all I believe for me at least as an archaeologist is among other things how they moved the the largest stone given the small population size of Pompeii as the island couldn't have supported a total population of more than 25 or 30,000 people they still created an architectural monument that rivals monuments and early civilizations all over the world basalt which is one of the heaviest stones in the world some of the stones there weigh up to 50 tons at NAMM a dollar is stacked up in walls 40 or 50 feet high it boggles the mind at how how it would have been created how could this superhuman feat of engineering have been possible since scholars estimate the population may only have numbered 25,000 people the stone is brittle and they're easily cracked or fractured and yet they elevated some of these columns up to eight meters above the in the tops of walls and did this thousands of times without breaking very many of them and that remains one of the real enigmas for me there's the details of the construction techniques itself how this vast city built of stones weighing as much as 50 tons was created is a riddle which haunts the imagination of the Islanders as powerfully as it perplexes modern scientists the Islanders absolutely insist that the stones of the city were levitated and magically flown through the air and then put into place other legends among the islanders of pompeii relate that a potent drug made from the pepper plant gave their ancestors superhuman strength to lift the stones scientists believe that the truth is every bit as surprising one of the striking things about not all and pompeii is the fact that given a very small population of maybe 25,000 people they were able to accomplish many of the same things with regard to stone construction and transport of massive stones that we see in the evolving civilizations like Egypt and Mesoamerica the creators of Nan made all had no beasts of burden or wheeled vehicles to help them instead scientists theorized that the stones which built nan Madol were moved with nothing more than ropes handmade from hibiscus vines and tree trunks used to slide the giant blocks into place if these theories are true then perhaps nowhere on earth have such monumental structures been so ingeniously created with such primitive technology proof that even when human technology is severely limited the potential for human creativity boundless recently some scientists have proposed an even more startling possibility that an underwater city exists near name a doll even more awe-inspiring than the one they built on their man-made islands [Music] Pompeii an oral history oral traditions do refer to a concept of various kinds of other worlds where people go for example when they their spirits go when they die there are elements of deep sea world that are reflected in some oral histories but the reference to an underwater city is unique and it's tied just an end the doll itself intrigued by legends of a lost underwater city at nan Madol author and explorer David Childress conducted his own investigation of the site the Islanders did not want us to actually go diving there they felt that the the city itself was a kind of a sacred city a city of the gods there's also a number of what appear to be columns coral encrusted columns that are about 80 feet deep in the water now a number of archaeologists have done some study for this including a University of Hawaiian University of Ohio where they have looked at some of these underwater structures and trying to find alignments to them for instance I mean there there appear to be like standing stones that are moving away from the city other scientists however dispute Childress's claim we've done some underwater archaeological exploration of this area and have found a series of large columns of rock like material that extend up from the coral reef but these appear to be all the ones we've looked at appear to be natural coral growth does an underwater city exists near nan Madol or is the legend only an echo with a mystique of nan made all itself the only certainty is that as scientists unlock the secrets of ancient technology this Forbidden City remains one of its most mystifying enigmas [Music] in all of history no single inventor has rivaled the brilliance of one transcendent genius Leonardo da Vinci when we look at Leonardo's mind what we see is a man who was capable of working in many dimensions he was one of these men who was good at everything the Renaissance painter is renowned as an artist who created some of the most serene images of earthly peace ever conceived yet ironically the same visionary artist who shaped the Mona Lisa's smile [Music] planted the deadly seeds of modern warfare for he designed countless fearsome weapons centuries before their time the machine gun would not be introduced into warfare until World War one when it would be put into action with devastating effect by early 1500 Leonardo had already conceived a multi-barreled cannon a major conceptual breakthrough mechanized warfare has proved decisive in modern battles from the Nazi blitzkrieg of World War two to Operation Desert Storm [Music] but incredibly Leonardo had already conceived of the principle of the tank centuries earlier [Music] it will need eight men to work it and make a turn and pursue the enemy this is good to break through the ranks Leonardo da Vinci of all the awesome weapons of the 20th century one has been called the jewel in the crown the submarine the most technologically complex weapon of modern warfare [Music] here in a prophetic sketch Leonardo envisions his design for the first submarine [Music] but Leonardo may have glimpsed the future and realized the ominous implications of this almost invincible weapon of destruction his letters reveal the grave misgivings of a man who feared the power of his invention I do not describe my method for remaining underwater for as long a time as I can remain this I do not publish or divulge on account of the evil nature of men who would practice assassination at the bottom of the seas Leonardo da Vinci [Music] housed in the French chateau where he spent his last year's these prototype models capture Leonardo's virtuosity in the arts of war [Music] ultimately however he would decide to abandon his designs for weapons of destruction for he called war madness but perhaps even a visionary such as Leonardo could not imagine that the technology of warfare he helped to advance would ultimately threaten mankind itself Leonardo would now turn his prodigious talents in an awesome series of directions his vision ranged from civil engineering and hydrodynamics to physiology the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci provide a startling insight into the mind of an inventive genius centuries ahead of his time this technology that he was writing about and drawing designs for her had to be kept a secret as well it was clearly a suppression of science going on he had to write in his own notebooks in a reverse mirror image just so that the powers-that-be wouldn't wouldn't even know what he was doing with these technological advances the very technique with which Leonardo recorded his ideas offers a clue to the extraordinary nature of his intelligence for in his sketchbooks it appears he wrote backwards with his left hand while sketching in the margins with his right if Leonardo's days were consumed with the practical realities of innovation his nights were filled with dreams of flight obsessed with the possibilities of aviation throughout his life Leonardo endlessly studied the anatomy of birds fascinated by the ease with which they soared through the air the bird in flight is an instrument working according to mathematical law which is in the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movement Leonardo da Vinci in his quest to soar with the birds Leonardo at first tried to imitate the structure of their wings in his designs [Music] but it was not until he imitated the design of a bats wings that his breakthrough in aeronautical design was realized [Music] it's innovative engineering has sparked an intriguing question would it have flown in my view they wouldn't work and they wouldn't work only because at the time he invented them he didn't have the materials to make them in today's society where we have these incredibly strong and very light materials it's more than possible that his machines or the ideas of his machines would work [Music] Leonardo's experiments with designs for flight went beyond imitating the anatomy of bats or birds was this strange craft the first design in history of a helicopter [Music] was this sketch the spark of inspiration for the parachute [Music] Byronic Lee it was not until the late 1800s that Leonardo's notebooks were carefully examined the world would not appreciate his innovative genius until others had made the same discoveries hundreds of years after his death [Music] tragically a man whose prodigious mind conceived countless technological wonders was doomed never to see them take shape as if to echo his frustration Leonardo scrawled in the margins of his notebooks again and again tell me if anything is ever done Leonardo da Vinci [Music] perhaps four visionaries on the frontiers of Technology the quest is never complete [Music] [Music] in the ancient world countless inventions were conceived and created only to be lost or forgotten from the Baghdad battery to the steam engine to the innovations of Leonardo da Vinci many potential breakthroughs were never pursued until centuries later why were so many ancient innovations doomed to oblivion in our modern world we have this idea that progress should occur and therefore people push it and that yields our Industrial Revolution the ancient people had a different idea in mind about what the goal of life was they didn't expect progress that didn't expect that things would always get better therefore when they hit upon a new innovation they didn't always follow it up in our own time as in the ancient world the indifference of an innovative society can condemn even the most brilliant inventions to obscurity for perhaps the greatest enemies of Technology throughout history have been those who lacked imagination [Music] even in modern times the failure to recognize the vast potential of technology has hindered its advancement in 1898 the director of the US Patent Office in Washington DC made an announcement which at the time may have seemed perfectly reasonable he had decided to close the office forever incredibly the in May 1898 the director of the US Patent Office proclaimed that there was nothing new to invent he said everything had been invented and he was the director of the Patent Office who who else should know but him of course he was horribly wrong there was so much more to invent fortunately in spite of his suggestion the Patent Office remained open and the thousands of inventions patented in recent decades have proved the potential for innovation is infinite but what is the true purpose of Technology ironically many now believe that as technology mushrooms it places the very future of mankind in jeopardy [Music] [Music] we're here if you like to tend and look after the garden of the earth so we have to function as a spiritual being and also as a material being and as material beings we need to manipulate the physical world around us we need to be able to realize our potential it's perhaps unfortunate that our material side becomes dominant in our thinking and that we devise technologies that are materially oriented and that don't in any way nourish the spiritual aspect of ourselves it is no longer a question of what we can accomplish with technology but of whether we have the wisdom to control it's awesome power sometimes it seems as if technology itself has become our most ruthless and implacable enemy I'm sure that there will be many more things inconceivable inventions that will come upon us God knows how we will cope with them for the last five thousand years human beings have been subjecting themselves to an unimaginable routine of rapid technical change so far we have survived but there is absolutely nothing to guarantee that we will in future [Music] throughout the world a new wave of Technology has evolved one for which ancient man had no need inventions to combat the devastating effects of technology itself [Music] Los Angeles California suffers from some of the worst air pollution in the United States largely a toxic byproduct to the automobile and yet in a state-of-the-art laboratory in Southern California an inventor named Jack bitterly and a small staff of engineers have designed a non polluting energy source for automobiles a flywheel made of densely packed carbon fibers spins in a vacuum chamber at up to 100,000 revolutions per minute as the wheel turns it generates electricity [Music] will this new technology prove a major breakthrough or only a dead end a dream doomed to oblivion [Music] only one thing is certain unless our society succeeds in combating the toxic effects of our own technology the results will be catastrophic what we're seeing is a cyclical event and it is more than possible that we are now at the fringes of another Dark Age where all our technology is going to get lost and we will plunge back down for another thousand years back down to primitive levels and then perhaps will rise again I don't believe that our technology will continue to advance the way that it is because I don't think our society will if through nuclear war or environmental disaster we plunge into another Dark Age what would future generations know of the achievements of our time our own understanding of the innovations of the past is just fragmentary [Music] we have only begun to probe the treasures of ancient technology expressions of the enduring genius of humanity the word genius means to me the divine spark in humanity the thing that is special about us that distinguishes us from the animals and we are different there is something special and very mysterious about mankind why do we suddenly become a conscious creature capable of self-examination wondering about the meaning of our lives there's something inside us that seems distinct almost from ourselves and that gives meaning to everything around us and it's from this this genius the spirit the soul of mankind if you like that everything that is special and valuable about mankind comes [Music] [Music] what a piece of work is man how noble in reason how infinite in faculties in form and moving how Express and admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a god William Shakespeare - somehow fuse the magic of modern technology with the spiritual wisdom of ancient times is perhaps the ultimate challenge of our troubled age and yet despite the hurdles the quest continues perhaps the passionate urge to create to leave our mark on the world is exactly the quality that makes us human it is a question we are forced to ponder on our travels in search of history [Music]
The baghdad battery was probably first used to light fires.