Is there such thing as "Lost Technology," or is that a myth?

I found this pretty interesting.

Is there such thing as "Lost Technology," or is that a myth?

Every industry has something called institutional, or tribal knowledge. Knowledge crucial to the industry which is never written down, either because its so basic that it’s not worth writing down or because it’s not something that can easily be written down.

But this knowledge only exists so long as people make use of it. There is a rumor that NASA lost the blueprints to the Saturn V rocket. While it is true that NASA no longer has the ability to produce these rockets, it’s not because they lost the blueprints, it’s because they lost the people.

The rockets were built by experts who could fill in the gaps left by the blueprints. Without them the knowledge to build these rockets was lost, since no blueprint can ever be 100% complete.

And that’s for a rocket build 50 years ago in a society with almost 100% literacy. Imagine how much more institutional knowledge was lost because the people who had it couldn’t write at all.

Damascus steel, real Damascus steel was a now forgotten alloy used to make swords. We believe that the steel itself was imported. Something happened to disrupt the trade routes, the blacksmiths had to find other jobs, and their knowledge wasn’t passed to the next generation.

Until recently Roman concrete was of a higher quality than modern concrete. The written recipe was written down, but something was always missing. Turns out the Romans used salt water for concrete, a detail so obvious to them they never wrote it down.

Antikythera Mechanism, computer model showing what it would have looked like when first built.

And then there are the one offs. The Antikythera Mechanism, the Baghdad Battery, Heron of Alexandria’s steam engine. The technologies that were produced by some mad genius, which never caught on because the technologies needed to make them useful didn’t exist.

A computer built by a society that had no concept of decimal math, let alone binary. A steam engine which couldn’t be scaled up because of inadequate metallurgy. A battery which had nothing to be plugged into.

Finally there are the technologies that were lost because even the people who used them didn’t fully understand them. The ancient Egyptians were using penicillin thousands of years before Alexander Fleming. But they had no means of purifying it, nor did they understand what it was.

And their knowledge was dismissed by future generations who saw it as mere superstition.