[music playing] NARRATOR: Every year, scholars
make new discoveries which shatter our vision
of our own past. They unearth clues which reveal
that ancient people created extraordinary innovations,
hundreds, even thousands of years ahead of their time. Did the Chinese invent
the fundamental technology for space exploration
centuries before Columbus? How did the ancient Egyptians
lift stones weighing 200 tons to the top of the
Great Pyramid of Giza, a feat which baffles
scientists to this day? 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. [music playing] NARRATOR: What weapons
of modern warfare were conceived by Leonardo
da Vinci, one of the world's greatest artists? Is it possible the ancient
man harnessed electricity 1,000 years ago? When the archeologists
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. NARRATOR: Centuries
before the birth of Jesus, did the ancient Greeks built
a prototype of the world's first analog computer? Was brain surgery practiced
in Peru over 1,000 years ago? There have been brain
operation where people have had surgery on their skulls done,
and we know they survived. NARRATOR: Journey to a
remote region of the Pacific where a long-dead civilization
fashioned a vast city on scores of islands it built itself. Travel high among the
Andes in South America to discover
monuments constructed by a vanished people with
stones twice the size of those that built the pyramids. What were the lost technological
secrets of ancient times? How were they created, then
thought to be lost forever? And how would our own
world have been transformed if their discoveries had been
developed over the centuries and instead of being lost
in the shadows of the past? Join us as we explore
the innovative genius of ancient man
and probe the past to reveal the startling lost
secrets of ancient technology. [music playing] 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 playing] As his humanness
emerged, what inner longing, what passion and
compelled early man to create, to invent, to utterly
transform his world? Perhaps one of his
earliest discoveries would help 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 warmth
and light around him, which perhaps gave him
the opportunity to, think perhaps even to
think abstract thoughts. NARRATOR: 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
voice to our innate genius for invention. And yet, today, when we
look back only 2,000 years, we perceive our
ancestors as primitive. 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
cases, the reverse is true. We are, in many ways,
considerably less sophisticated than our predecessors. [music playing] NARRATOR: 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 playing] The quest for flight has long
been viewed as a 20th century breakthrough. But is this ancient
object discovered in a tomb near
Saqqara, Egypt 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 airfoil
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. NARRATOR: Other scientists,
however, strongly disagree. TOM CROUCH: It has been
suggested that the Saqqara bird represents an
early flying machine. Maybe it was a
hand-launched glider, or maybe it was even
a model, some people have suggested, for
a larger aircraft. I don't think that's the case. NARRATOR: Was the
Saqqara glider intended to represent an early aircraft? The controversy remains. [music playing] But even the most skeptical
scientists now concede that ancient inventors achieved
astonishing feats of technology which cannot be equaled today. Damascus steel, first
created over 2,000 years ago. DAVID SIM: 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 steels that are similar to
Damascus steel, we have never been able to
reproduce it perfectly. NARRATOR: 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. [music playing] The strength and cutting power
of this tempered steel blade from a technology
over 1,000 years old has not been duplicated
even in the space age. It is only one of the lost
secrets of ancient technology which still baffles
scholars to this day. 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. [music playing, crowd shouting] NARRATOR: Tragically,
throughout history, barbarism has threatened to destroy
priceless treasures of human knowledge. [music playing] Perhaps the greatest crime ever
committed in the ancient world was the willful destruction of
these extraordinary buildings in Alexandria, Egypt. In the legendary
library of Alexandria was a treasure trove holding
the accumulated secrets of centuries of
ancient technology. Starting in the year 48
before the common era, 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. What priceless secrets went
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-- to-- 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 playing] NARRATOR: If this ancient
reservoir of world knowledge had survived, how
would the wisdom it contained have transformed our past,
our present, and our future? Only now are scientists
finally unearthing the lost secrets of
ancient technology, inventions before their
time, hidden for hundreds, even thousands of years. 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 playing] 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
explode long-held assumptions about ancient technology. When the archeologists
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-- 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
first century AD. [music playing] NARRATOR: Was it possible
an ancient inventor had constructed an
electrical battery? PAUL KEYSER: 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 darn 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. NARRATOR: But what was
the battery's purpose? Some scientists have speculated
the current from the Baghdad battery might have been used
to electroplate silver objects with a patina of gold, but
some scholars disagree. The artifact was found
in a house that is clearly a magician's 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 battering as something medical. [music playing] NARRATOR: 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. NARRATOR: To support his
theory, Professor Keyser 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. PAUL KEYSER: We have a
first century AD Latin text by a man named Scribonius 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. [music playing] NARRATOR: 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, could he have conceived how the
magic of electricity would someday
transform the world? [music playing] As mysterious as the creation
of the Baghdad battery was, why was it suddenly abandoned,
not to be reinvented until 1,900 years later? 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 archeology,
its cargo of priceless marble and bronze statues
was recognized at once as a work of Greek artisans
from the time of Jesus. But one mysterious object
baffled scientists. This seemingly worthless
barnacle-encrusted hunk of bronze had split into
four fragments, which revealed geared wheels
adorned with barely legible inscriptions. The discovery languished
forgotten in the basement of a Greek museum for another
half century, then, in 1951, an American historian, Professor
Derek de Solla Price of Yale became fascinated with
the mysterious object. Could it be that something
existed in ancient times far more advanced than
modern scientists were willing to admit? In 1971, Price
received permission from the Greek government
to X-ray the device. 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. [music playing] 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. PAUL KEYSER: The mid-first
century AD, an engineer named Hero, or in
Greek, Heron, invented a number of very clever
devices, one of which has been called
the steam engine. He put water in the kettle,
he would boil the water, the steam rises up through
the tube, goes into the ball, and comes out the two 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 1,000 to 1,500 rotations per minute. NARRATOR: Had Hero
unwittingly invented the first working steam engine? If he had combined its principle
with other concepts which he had already developed, Hero
might have built the world's first steam locomotive,
perhaps even launched the modern industrial age. Professor Keyser has an
even more intriguing theory. PAUL KEYSER: 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, you could actually make something move without
pushing against anything. What it really was was a
demonstration of the principal of the jet or rocket. NARRATOR: Whether Hero 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. But what if these brilliant
early inventions had been pursued rather than abandoned? If the Greeks had
developed the steam engine, would a European explorer 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, would Shakespeare have been
writing his plays on a laptop? If the electrical battery
invented in ancient Iraq had been refined for generations
instead of being forgotten, would our own technology
be vastly more advanced than it is today? Perhaps the reason these
miracles of ancient technology were never pursued says less
about their brilliant inventors than it does about the
shortsightedness of those around them. For in ancient time,
and in our own, quantum leaps into
the future are only possible if the human
imagination will expand to accept them. [music playing] Throughout the world,
awe-inspiring monuments of stone bear witness to the
genius of ancient architects and engineers. And looming 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. To ask the question
of how they were made is to confront one of the
most profound mysteries of ancient times. Believed to have been created
almost 5,000 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. NARRATOR: The pyramids
have been studied perhaps more than any other
ancient monument on Earth. Yet, scholars can still not
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. The 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 labor. [music playing] NARRATOR: However the stones
were brought to the building site, scholars agree the
ancient Egyptians then faced an even more formidable
task, for how could these enormous blocks of stone
be lifted 20, 30, even 40 storeys above the ground? The question has puzzled
scholars since ancient times. DAVID CHILDRESS: A French
structural engineer by the name of Joseph
Davidovits has 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 of stone
that 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. NARRATOR: Without possessing
modern measuring instruments, how did the builders
of the Great Pyramid achieved such an astounding
degree of accuracy? GRAHAM HANCOCK: These
ancients were looking at the stars and very precisely
aligning their monuments to the stars. The characteristic
of the Giza site 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
6 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. NARRATOR: For
thousands of years, we have gazed at them in wonder,
and yet, their secrets still remain. [music playing] Even more mysterious
than the age old riddle of how the Egyptians
might have constructed the pyramids are the
technological achievements of ancient civilizations
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 ancient
engineering genius. While the Egyptian pyramids
proclaim their splendor to the world, the very
existence of a lost Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru was
deliberately kept secret for centuries to protect
it from hostile invaders. [music playing] Machu Picchu's purpose and
the secrets of the technology that built it remain a source
of controversy 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 9,000 feet. To achieve the formidable feat
of constructing Machu Picchu, the Incas had to move stones
weighing as much as 200 tons in a seemingly superhuman
test of physical stamina in the thin air
of the high Andes. What made the creation
of Machu Picchu possible? Was it a result of an ingenious
technology which we do not yet comprehend? While there is evidence
for ramps to bring stones up along the 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. NARRATOR: After literally
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. It 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. NARRATOR: As puzzling as the
precision of the stonework is the question of
why it was created. Scholars speculate that Machu
Picchu may have been a summer retreat for the emperor of
the Incas and his court. And yet, the mystery of
its creation remains. [music playing] In the quest for the lost
secrets of the ancient master builders, perhaps
the ultimate mystery 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 Tiahuanaco. Almost nothing is known of its
mysterious creators, who some believe lived here as
early as 14,000 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. Yet, curiously, the quarry
from which it was cut is nearly 200 miles away. The biggest blocks
at Giza weigh 200 tons. The biggest blocks of
Tiahuanaco weigh 400 tons. 400 ton blocks of stone used to
create enormous constructions 12,500 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 tons blocks. Again, whether we
like it or not, we're looking at the evidence
of a technology, and one that we don't understand. NARRATOR: Even more impressive
than the weight of 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
an astonishing 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 playing] From Machu Picchu to Tiahuanaco,
and perhaps other lost sites yet undiscovered, vast
monuments across the world remain among the most mystifying
and the most enduring evidence of the prowess of
ancient technology. [music playing] La Pampa Colorado,
the red plain of Peru. It has not rained in this
remote and hostile desert for over 10,000 years. This is the ancient domain of
a mysterious and long forgotten people known as
the Nazca Indians. Here, their 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, head-hunters who wore the decapitated
heads of their slain enemies as trophies. Yet, surprisingly,
these warlike people were also pioneers
on the frontiers of ancient technology. 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 playing] I think it's extraordinary
that people really did do brain surgery 2,000 years
ago, and we know they did because the skulls
still exist with the wounds completely healed. [music playing] NARRATOR: 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. But as remarkable as
these archeological findings is the mystery to be
found above ground at Nazca. For here, inscribed
on the desert floor, is one of the most baffling
and spectacular creations of ancient technology
known as the Nazca lines. What you see in Nazca is huge. It's on a-- it's
on a vast scale. 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 playing] NARRATOR: 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 the
top layer of stones to bare the lighter
soil beneath, the Nazca created
their masterpiece. [music playing] 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
Reiche, who first saw the Nazca lines in 1940. You can see the lines
are absolutely straight, and people have wondered very
often how the ancient people could do these straight
lines without any engineering instruments. [music playing] NARRATOR: For the next 50
years, until her death in 1991, Maria Reiche's 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's
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. NARRATOR: The
fundamental question remains, why was this
enigmatic achievement carved into the desert if it can
only be seen from the air? Now, there are 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 shamans to view, and that these
Peruvian shamans were ingesting hallucinogenic
cactus, for instance, and then would be
astrally launched spiritually over the plains. NARRATOR: Searching for
more down-to-earth answers, archeologists have discovered
intriguing clues buried in the dusty soil of the plain,
startling artifacts seemingly depicting people in flight
in hot air balloons. Mummies 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 had scarcely been
duplicated to this day. Scientists wondered, were
these durable textiles and ancient depictions
of balloons in flight missing links in the
riddle of the lines? Could the ancients have intended
that the Nazca lines be viewed from a primitive hot
air balloon, fashioned from this light, but
resilient fabric. American archeologist named
Jim Woodman and his crew built a-- a balloon, a-- a hot
air building 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. NARRATOR: In the cold
dawn of July 6, 1967, Woodman and Julian Nott
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 playing] JULIAN NOTT: 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 1,000 years ago could have
built a hot air balloon and could have flown it. Whether they did, that is
still, indeed, a mystery. NARRATOR: Were
the lines intended to be viewed from
a hot air balloon, or were they created for
some mysterious purpose beyond our comprehension? The clues are few,
a scrap of fabric, a drawing on a shattered
urn, but the colossal labor of the ancient Nazca
Indians will forever remain one of the most
enduring achievements of ancient technology. [music playing] Europe in the 10th century. 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. Faster than graves could be
dug, victims of the Black Death were buried. In this bleak world, science,
medicine, and technology was seen as being in direct
conflict with Christianity. Western Europe was mired in
the Dark Ages and the haunted landscape of the medieval mind. Yet, half a world away, there
was a startlingly different universe. [music playing] ACTOR AS HUIZONG: He who paints
in bright colors cannot use his brush here. Creation alone leaves
the masterpiece. Emperor Huizong, 1100
of the Common Era. NARRATOR: China, a
civilization that reaches back over 3,000 years. Yet, paradoxically,
this ancient kingdom would nurture technological
achievements which scholars today consider
surprisingly modern. 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. But it wasn't only medicine
where the Chinese made 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. For scholars of
ancient technology, the enduring
mystery remains, who were these mighty innovators? Why were the Chinese so
far ahead of their time? China develop 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. [gong bonging, people shouting] NARRATOR: If necessity is
the mother of invention, perhaps curiosity is its father. 200 years before
the birth of Christ, the first Chinese
emperor, Shi Huang, 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. Shi Huang 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
elixirs of immortality, medicines that would
make you live forever. And in the course of
investigating some of the interesting
substances that they had come across, particularly,
potassium nitrate, salt peter, they made certain
mixtures which they found had very strange properties. One text of the ninth century
AD detailed one mixture with sulfur, salt peter,
and honey, and says, this is one of a
number of recipes that you must never make. [music playing, fire whooshing] NARRATOR: Ironically,
alchemists 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. [music playing, weapons firing] Gunpowder was already
in use in Chinese armies in the 11th century AD,
when people in Europe were still simply
hitting one another over the head with clubs
and stabbing one another with swords and spears. [music playing] NARRATOR: 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. [music playing, weapons firing] CHRISTOPHER CULLEN: 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 was not there. NARRATOR: Although the
emperor equipped his army with gunpowder weapons,
the new invention was used by the
Chinese primarily for their own enjoyment. [MUSIC PLAYING, FIREWORKS
EXPLODING] During a fireworks festival
honoring Emperor Lizong 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 firework's 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. [music playing] Incredibly, ancient
Chinese technology has taken us to
the Moon and back. In this sophisticated court
of the emperor's palace, a spoon laid upon a
bronze plate had the power to literally change the world. Magicians and conjurers in
the emperor's inner circle used the device in the art
of geomancy, or feng shui, the supernatural Chinese
study of aligning dwellings harmoniously with the magnetic
currents of the Earth's surface. A 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. Incredibly, 300 years
before the birth of Jesus, the Chinese had
invented the compass. It is a mystery to scholars that
though the Chinese developed the compass for use in magic,
they did not at first use it as a tool of navigation. 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. Strangely, 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 is an
immense store of merit attached to somebody
who passes on or copies or freely distributes one
of the Buddhist scriptures. NARRATOR: The earliest
printed text in the world was a Buddhist charm scroll
printed in the year 704. At that time in Europe, the
common man was barely literate. By the 10th century, printing
had exploded in China, as a variety of books were
published in the 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 Gutenberg, copy
out books if he wanted them. In China, you went to a
bookshop and you bought one. NARRATOR: Johannes
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. CHRISTOPHER CULLEN:
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, magnetic compass, and gunpowder,
the origins of which he 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 playing] NARRATOR: Mysteriously, 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. CHRISTOPHER CULLEN: This huge,
feudal 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. [music playing] NARRATOR: 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, thousands of years before. [music playing] 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 enigmas
of ancient technology. DAVID CHILDRESS: On a remote
Pacific island in Micronesia, about 1,000 miles
northeast of New Guinea, an island known as Pohnpei
is what is probably the eighth wonder of the world. NARRATOR: The
people of the island called this forbidden place Nan
Madol, 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? It's totally uninhabited. The islanders who live
on Pohnpei Island are-- are afraid to go to this city,
and they believe that if they do go there, they will die. It's-- it's like a
city of the dead, and it's reported by people who
live near it at night that they see lights moving
through the city. NARRATOR: Scholars
believe Nan Madol was built over 1,500 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. 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. [music playing] 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 Nan Madol, I believe, for me, at
least, as an archeologist, is among other things, how
they moved the largest stones. Given the small population
size of Pohnpei, as the island couldn't have
supported a total population of more than 25,000
or 30,000 people, it still created an
architectural monument that rivals monuments
in early civilizations all over the world. Basalt, which is one of the
heaviest stones in the world, some of the stones, they weigh
up to 50 tons at Nan Madol are stacked up in walls
40 or 50 feet high. It boggles the mind at how--
how it would have been created. NARRATOR: How could this
superhuman feat of engineering have been possible for a
population scholars estimate may have only numbered
25,000 people? PAUL KEYSER: The
stone is brittle and they're easily
cracked or fractured, and yet, they elevated some of
these columns up to 8 meters above 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. [music playing] NARRATOR: How could this
vast city built of stones weighing as much as 50 tons
possibly have been created? It 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 this city
were levitated and magically flown through the air
and then put into place. NARRATOR: Other legends among
the islanders of Pohnpei relate that a potent drug
made from a 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 Nan Madol and Pohnpei 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 Meso America. NARRATOR: The
creators of Nan Madol had no beasts of burden or
wheeled vehicles to help them. Instead, scientists believe that
somehow, 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 is boundless. [music playing] Recently, scientists have
proposed an even more startling possibility. Could an underwater city exist
near Nan Madol, even more awe-inspiring than
the one they built on their man-made islands? WILLIAM AYRES:
Pohnpeian oral history, oral traditions do refer to
that concept of various kinds of other worlds where people go,
for example, when their spirits go, when they die. There are elements of a deep
sea world that are reflected in some oral histories, but the
reference to an underwater city is unique in its tie
just to Nan Madol itself. NARRATOR: Intrigued by
tantalizing legends of a lost underwater city at Nan Madol,
author and explorer David Childress conducted his own
investigation of the site. DAVID CHILDRESS: The islanders
did not want us to actually go diving there. They felt that the city itself
was 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 archeologists have
done some studies of this, including the
University of Hawaii and the University of Ohio,
where they have looked at some of these underwater structures
and tried to find alignments to them. For instance, I
mean, there-- there appear to be like, standing
stones that are moving away from the city. [music playing] NARRATOR: Other
scientists, however, dispute Childress' claim. We've done some underwater
archeological explor-- 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. NARRATOR: Does an underwater
city exist near Nan Madol, or is the legend only an echo
of the mystique of Nan Madol itself? The only certainty is that as
scientists unlock the secrets of ancient technology, this
forbidden city remains one of its most mystifying enigmas. 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. NARRATOR: The
Renaissance painter was 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 planted the deadly seeds of modern warfare,
for he designed countless fearsome weapons
centuries before their time. [music playing] The machine gun and would not
be introduced into warfare until World War I, when
it would see action with devastating effect. [weapons firing] [music playing] 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 II, to operation Desert Storm. [music playing] But incredibly,
Leonardo had already conceived of the principle of
the tank centuries earlier. Of all the awesome
weapons of the Space Age, one has been called the jewel
in the crown, the submarine, the most technologically complex
weapon of modern warfare. Here, in a prophetic sketch,
Leonardo envisions his design for the first submarine. Could Leonardo 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 an invention before its time. ACTOR AS LEONARDO DA VINCI:
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 playing] NARRATOR: Housed in
the French chateau where he spent his last years,
these prototype models capture Leonardo's virtuosity
in the arts of war. Ultimately, however, he would
decide to abandon his designs for weapons of destruction,
for he called war madness. [music playing] 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
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 had to be
kept a secret as well. There 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. [music playing] NARRATOR: 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. [music playing] 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. In his quest to
soar with the birds, Leonardo at first trying
to imitate the structure of their wings in his designs. But it was not until he imitated
the design of a bat's wings that his breakthrough
in aeronautical design was realized. Its 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 playing] NARRATOR: Leonardo's experiments
with designs for flight went beyond imitating the
anatomy of bats and birds. Was this strange
craft the first design in history of a helicopter? Was this sketch the spark of
inspiration for the parachute? Ironically, 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 his same
discoveries hundreds of years after his death. [music playing] Tragically, a man whose
prodigious mind conceived countless technological
wonders was doomed to never see them take shape. As if to echo his
frustration, Leonardo scrawled in the margins of his
notebooks again and again-- ACTOR AS LEONARDO DA VINCI: Tell
me if anything is ever done. Leonardo da Vinci. NARRATOR: Perhaps
for the visionaries on the frontiers of technology,
the quest is never complete. [music playing] 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? PAUL KEYSER: In
our modern world, we have this idea that
progress should occur, and therefore, people push it,
and that reveals our Industrial Revolution. The ancient people had
a different idea in mind about what the goal of life was. They didn't expect progress. They didn't expect that things
would always get better, therefore, when they hit
upon a new innovation, they didn't always follow it up. [music playing] NARRATOR: In our own time,
as in the ancient world, the indifference of 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. 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 1898,
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. [music playing] NARRATOR: Fortunately, in
spite of his suggestion, the Patent Office remained open,
and the thousands of inventions patented in recent decades
have proved that the potential for innovation is infinite. [music playing] But what is the true
purpose of technology? Many believe that, ironically,
as technology has mushroomed, it has placed the very future
of mankind in jeopardy. [music playing, bombs exploding] GRAHAM HANCOCK: We're here,
if you like, to tend and look after the garden of the Earth. 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. NARRATOR: It is no
longer a question of what we can accomplish with
technology, but of whether we have the wisdom to
control its awesome power. For sometimes, it seems
as if technology itself has become our most ruthless
and implacable enemy. CHRISTOPHER CULLEN: 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 5,000
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 playing] NARRATOR: 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 playing] Los Angeles, California suffers
from some of the worst air pollution in the United States,
largely, a toxic byproduct of 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. Will this new technology prove
a major breakthrough, or only a dead end, a dream
doomed to oblivion? 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 1,000 years back
down to primitive levels, and then, perhaps,
we'll 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. [music playing] NARRATOR: If, through nuclear
war or environmental disaster, we plunge into another dark age,
what will future generations know of the achievements
of our time? Our understanding of the
innovations of the past is just as fragmentary. 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 is 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 playing]
