the May/June 1973 issue of Saudi Aramco World, Richard W. Bulliet wrote in “Why They Lost The Wheel”, “Eastern society wilfully abandoned the use of the wheel, one of mankind’s greatest inventions,” opting instead to use camels, which were more suited for travel than the horses and chariots used earlier in Egypt and Rome.There are other examples of lost technology such as The Antikythera Mechanism, “Discovered in a shipwreck in 1900, this device was built around 150-100 BC with levels of miniaturization and mechanical complexity that weren’t replicated until around 1500 years later. After much speculation, in 2008 scientists determined that it tracked the Metonic calendar, predicted solar eclipses, and calculated the timing of the Ancient Olympic Games.”Damascus Steel swords, which were generally made in the Middle East anywhere from 540 A.D. to 1800 A.D., were sharper, more flexible and harder/stronger than other contemporary blades. They were also visually different, having a marbling pattern called “damask,” that hinted at a special technique/alloy. But production gradually stopped over the years, and the highly-guarded technique was lost – no modern smiths or metallurgists have been able to definitively solve the techniques/alloys used in forging those swords.John Ochsendorf, the architectural rebel who champions ancient engineers recently wrote that, “Old masonry buildings are stressed very low, and so the fundamental issue is that we had knowledge accumulated over centuries, or even millennia, which with the Industrial Revolution was essentially thrown out and we don’t really build like that anymore. Engineers are taught today in universities that there are really two dominant materials—steel and concrete—and so when they come to an old structure, too often we’re trying to make old structures conform to the theories that we learned for steel and concrete; whereas it’s more useful generally to think of them as problems of stability and geometry, because the stresses in these monuments are very, very low. At root, the fundamental issue is that we’ve lost centuries of knowledge, which has been replaced by other knowledge about how to build in steel and concrete. But today’s knowledge doesn’t necessarily map easily onto those older structures. And if we try to make them conform to our theories, it’s very easy to say that these older structures don’t work. It’s a curious concept for an engineer to come along to a building that’s been standing for 500 years and to say this building is not safe.”

How does information get lost?