How technology is lost
When the third war with the Roman Empire was looming, historian Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian, sailed to Carthage to talk with the leaders. They controlled an important technology, which was shortly thereafter lost to Europe. Carthage was on the north shore of Africa, in Tunisia, across from Italy.
Historians refer to it as a Phoenician colony, but the Phoenicians were too few in number to have populated all the ancient colonies around the Mediterranean that are attributed to them [although as seafarers and traders relatively few Phoenicians could have stimulated the growth of a maritime-based prosperity around the Mediterranean. Ed.]. Many of these colonies were Israelite, ostensibly dominated by the tribes of Dan and the Judahite clan of Zarah. Phoenicians and Israelites shared the same written language, paleo-Hebrew, so that it is difficult millennia later to know who was who.
What the Phoenicians had technologically were long boats. They had them for centuries, extending back to the third millennium BC. These boats had an eagle masthead and according to the historian Cyrus Gordon had twice the tonnage of Christopher Colombus’ largest ship. For centuries, the Phoenicians were the long-haul carriers of the ancient near-east world.
According to first-century BC historian Strabo (citing Eratosthenes), the Carthaginians had 300 towns in Atlantis. They told Diodorus that if they lost the war, they would relocate to them using their long boats. History records that Carthage lost the Third Punic (Phoenician) War (146 BC) with Rome, and they subsequently disappeared from history along with long boat technology.
After that, only the Norse (Vikings) had similar boats in Europe, which they used to establish colonies in Greenland and New England. This was centuries before Columbus’s re-discovery of the Western Hemisphere at Mesoamerica, called Aztlán by the Aztecs, and modified for easier Greek pronunciation to Atlantis. (The whereabouts of Atlantis remain speculative if one reads only Plato’s Timaeus and not Diodorus, Strabo, or Poseidonius.)
Thus we have an account in history of where a transportation technology that was important for centuries in moving people and goods long distances around Europe, the Middle East, the horn of Africa, India, and beyond, was lost to Europeans.
Roman ships did not have comparable performance to the long-boats, though durable contents of sunken wooden boats, such as Roman coins and amphorae (vases), have been found off the coasts of Massachusetts, Honduras and Guanabara Bay, Brazil. Long-boat technology was lost to Europe because of war. Roman geopolitical strategists must not have taken into account the loss to the empire of an important technology in the defeat of a rival.
In our time of global interaction, could technology be lost by war or other social factors? Loss need not be caused by a social event but merely by environmental factors. A trend in information technology is toward increasing fragility.
Petroglyphs have lasted for millennia. Books and parchments have lasted for centuries, even millennia. In contrast, flash memory drives are rated to reliably hold their data for at most a few decades. Magnetic memory – such as audio or video-tapes or floppy disks – in a humid atmosphere fails within only a few years from mould. Non-operating hard disk drives fail when (not if) ambient moisture eventually penetrates the seals and is not driven out by the heat dissipated during operation. In a warm, humid climate (such as around the Caribbean region), a non-operating HDD stored in humid, unconditioned air will last about a year, sometimes less.
CDs and DVDs are also fragile. A four-CD Deutsche Grammaphon recording of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner was packaged with light foam layers, to cushion the CDs in the holder. I left my copy on a shelf in tropical air for a decade, reopened it, and found to my surprise that the silver recording film layer was cleanly removed, leaving only the transparent polyethylene base. (This has not happened for CDs or DVDs in contact with paper or held up in air.) The plastic foam must have been a culture medium for metal-munching microbes. Conductive foam used for storing integrated circuits also disintegrates in heat and humidity.
The three main causes of environmental biochemical degradation – dust, rust, and must (mould) – take their toll on electronics. Connectors, metal shields, and relay contacts rust, metal traces on boards fail from the corrosive effects of dust and rust, component leads corrode, and mould permeates electrochemical and optical components.
Electronically recorded information is useless without the electronics to read the media. Large 8-inch or Apple II floppy disks would be difficult to read today except by nostalgic old-timers maintaining obsolete floppy drives as museum pieces. Old HDDs with Shugart interfaces are also unreadable without considerable effort. Yet a paper book such as Ernest Guillemin’s Introductory Circuit Theory (Wiley, 1953), stored on my bookshelf for over a decade in a hot and humid climate, shows no appreciable signs of deterioration and its content is readily accessible at a glance.
Both public and private library books are being stored in a digital medium nowadays while the original books, stripped of their binder for bulk feeding into scanners, are discarded. Some school libraries abandon paper-medium information sources altogether because they occupy valuable room space while an entire library can be stored on a large HDD or two, or in distributed form on the Internet, or even more ephemerally as cloud computing. The minimalist result is that society becomes dependent for information on preservation of a few large repositories, located remotely and under the control of others. As the world goes digital, how much of this information will exist 200 years from now?
Social upheaval can also cause valuable knowledge to be lost from lack of distribution. Some believe that important advances made by Tesla have disappeared from public purview, as have data from German and Japanese advanced-technology projects in the 1930s and ‘40s and from the Russians in the Soviet era. These somewhat mysterious possibilities however, are overshadowed by the mundane loss of project notebooks in companies that quickly lose interest in projects upon their completion or abandonment. The engineers to whom the notebooks have meaning and enduring value move and by obligation leave the company-owned notebooks behind while the companies dump them as no longer relevant because of a change in project interests. (Note to engineers: if at all possible, make copies of your more valuable technical notebooks and take them with you as an extension of your mind – something you take with you anyway.) Patents perhaps have their greatest institutional value in documenting technical ideas for public dissemination so that they will not be lost in a discarded project notebook.
From a larger perspective, as scientific and engineering knowledge increases superlinearly, the number of persons sustaining this knowledge must also increase superlinearly. It is possible to capture knowledge in the form of information, in explanatory documents of various kinds, but it is only active or “on line” in the minds of those who understand and apply it expertly. Records of explanations only have meaning to those who grasp their significance. If society regresses, the institutions supporting expertise weaken, fewer new people appear who can sustain the knowledge base, and sci-tech progress slows and even begins to regress in some specialties. At some point of social regression, technological knowledge is lost and with it the ability to work with surviving artefacts of the lost technology. Although this has not at all been the trend of the previous century, there is no basic reason for why it cannot happen during a time of increased social duress in the developed world.
A case in point is close at hand, as analog engineers see the diminishing emphasis on continuous electrical functions give way to digital electronics. Some wonder whether analog electronics might become a lost art to the extent that some of the more advanced or refined aspects of the field might actually have to be rediscovered and recovered in the future. Simplifying insights that some have but are not widespread might be lost.
There is no guarantee that the path of development of technology is optimal or even monotonic, and a return to earlier, less-developed, or near-lost ideas might be the path to advancement in new directions. For instance, although FETs are the dominant transistor nowadays, it was invented decades before the BJT but was not developed. How many more good ideas will remain in that state because of a lack of people to sustain the widening base of technology?
Besides major social upheaval, such as that caused by war or revolution, severe economic downturn or global financial failure can disrupt both academic and industrial progress and lead to a reversion of effort to recover slipping concepts. Hopefully, a few people who have mastered topics that regain importance can be found, and seminars, books, or other forms of dissemination flourish from them. Progress can be slowed because not enough engineers and technicians have a sufficiently clear understanding of some concepts. Suppose a leader in analog IC design leaves other less capable engineers to puzzle over some of the subtler aspects of clever designs, and they are unsuccessful in recovering them from a reverse-engineering attempt. Technology is lost. On a national scope, if education institutions underperform, resulting in an insufficient number of competent engineers, then others from rising societies with better test scores step in to sustain the knowledge-base by gaining experience in the failing country. In this case, technology is sustained overall, but is lost in locales. Not only might poor education cause this, the demographics of aging populations might result in too few capable people. The Trilateral world of Japan, North America, and Western Europe is aging. At the turn of the millennium, the average age in Japan was 58 and in the USA was 48. In Panama it was 19. How much existing knowledge will not be passed on because of a lack of capable people to sustain the widening base of technology?
Dennis Feucht has his own laboratory, Innovatia, on a jungle hilltop in Belize, where he performs electronics research, technical writing, and helps others with product development. He has written a four-volume book-set on analog circuit design, has completed a book on transistor amplifier design and is working on a book on power electronics.
This article first appeared on EE Times’ Planet Analog website.
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