Mysterious inventions that changed the world

Technology can have a dark past. The recipe is lost. The author is unknown. Sometimes two strangers file for the same patent on the same day, and the dispute drags on for a century and a half. Objects assembled from such scraps have changed everyday life, war, and science no less than their clear-cut counterparts, and were formed from letters, oral traditions, and laboratory accidents.

Historians of technology classify all sorts of cases as mysteries. Sometimes the composition is lost, as with Greek fire and Damascus steel. Sometimes a discovery is 1,500 years ahead of its time, like a mechanism from the bottom of the Aegean Sea. Sometimes an idea comes in a dream, through a spilled solution, or a resistor pulled from a box without looking. Behind each object are very specific people: a sponge diver, an alchemist, a blacksmith, a physiologist.

Mechanism from the bottom of the Aegean Sea

A lump of bronze in storage

In the autumn of 1900, a storm drove a boat of sponge divers from Symi Island onto the rocky island of Antikythera. Below, at a depth of about fifty meters, lay the wreckage of an ancient ship: marble statues, amphorae, and lumps of hardened bronze. Diver Elias Stadiatis came up on deck screaming that he had seen dead people. The dead people turned out to be statues.

The salvage took over a year and was carried out by the Greek navy; working at the depths of those years killed one of the crew and paralyzed another. Decompression sickness is still a common occurrence among deep-sea workers today. The ship sank approximately between 70 and 60 BC, and silver coins from the hold, minted between 76 and 67, provide a date limit.

The bronze lumps remained undetected until May 17, 1902, when archaeologist Valerios Stais spotted a cogwheel in a piece of oxidized bronze. The vessel was dated to the first century BC, making the find a clear anachronism. The bronze remained silent for another half century.

Sky on gears

The first to take the matter seriously was British science historian Derek de Solla Price. He obtained X-ray images, identified dozens of gears, and in 1974 published a monograph on the Greek gears, calling the discovery the oldest known analog calculator. Price died in 1983, without seeing the full decipherment.

A turning point occurred in 2005, when an industrial-strength CT scanner weighing nearly eight tons arrived at the Athens Archaeological Museum. The device scanned a handful of bronze lumps, and the scans revealed something no one had seen in the previous hundred years. A year later, Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth’s team published their results in the journal Nature.

Eighty-two fragments and approximately thirty wheels with hand-cut teeth have survived. The case is being reconstructed as a wooden box, approximately 34 x 18 x 9 centimeters. The device read the sky. The front dial showed the positions of the Sun and Moon, and the lunar phase was displayed by a ball, silvered on one side.

The rear spirals counted the Metonic cycle of 235 lunar months, or 19 solar years, and the Saros cycle of 223 months, which was used to predict eclipses. A separate small circle kept track of the dates of the four Panhellenic Games: the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean. The main trick was hidden in the gearing, where a pair of wheels with a pin in a slot caused the lunar hand to slow down and speed up, mimicking the uneven motion of a real satellite, as theorized by Hipparchus.

The inscriptions are still legible. By 2016, more than 3,400 symbols had been removed from the fragments, and among them, something resembling an owner’s manual was identified. In 2021, a team from University College London proposed a model of the front panel with rings for the planets.

Price pointed to Rhodes: Hipparchus worked there, and Cicero left a description of Archimedes’ celestial sphere, which was taken to Rome. No other device with a comparable gear mechanism has been found until European astronomical clocks of the 14th century; al-Biruni’s astrolabe, dating from around the year 1000, has a single gear. The device was recovered from a merchant ship, and there’s still debate about whether its owner intended to sell it.

From the depths of the Aegean Sea, the path leads to the Bosphorus.

The fire that burned on the water

The chronicler Theophanes dates the event to 672: a refugee from Syrian Heliopolis, today’s Baalbek, the architect and craftsman Callinicus, arrived in Constantinople. He brought the Romans, as the Byzantines called themselves, the secret of liquid flame; sources refer to it as "sea fire."

It burned marvelously. A stream was spewed from bronze siphons on the ships’ prows; the flames poured onto the decks, the rigging, the water, and continued to burn, clinging to anything. Anna Comnena left this description in the "Alexiad":

"The flames belching from the pipes cannot be extinguished with water."

Arab fleets retreated from the city walls twice, in 674–678 and 717–718, and chroniclers attributed this to new weapons. Bishop Liutprand left a story about 941, when siphons burned Prince Igor’s boats. Hand-held siphons for infantry also existed.

The secret was kept tightly. Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus instructed his son in the mid-10th century:

"This fire has been revealed to us by God. If anyone begs for it even for gold, reject and refuse this request."

The composition remains unknown. In 1977, historian John Haldon and his co-authors proposed a base of crude oil with pine resin and additives; later reconstructions have tried sulfur, saltpeter, and quicklime, but there is no definitive answer. Archaeologists have found terracotta "grenades" from the Byzantine period, small vessels filled with flammable material.

The secret remained within the imperial family and among a small circle of artisans. After the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, traces of the recipe disappeared. Later military treatises advised extinguishing such fires with sand, strong vinegar, or old urine, as water was ineffective.

The story with metal was similar, with the difference that the recipe died out on its own.

Water pattern on the blade

Black, glassy pellets — ingots of wootz, high-carbon steel made from closed crucibles — were exported from the ports of southern India. They were forged into blades throughout the Middle East and sold in Damascus, where the steel was named.

The pattern was instantly recognizable. The wavy lines resembled flowing water, and Eastern legend claims that the saber cut through a silk scarf thrown into the air. Technically, the pattern was created by bands of cementite, or iron carbide, in a soft pearlite base: the hard bands held the edge, while the soft base withstood the impact.

By the mid-18th century, wootz smelting had died out. Several reasons have been cited: exhausted ore veins, forests cleared for coal, and the collapse of trade routes. The masters themselves passed down the process orally, and the chain of command was severely disrupted. Even Michael Faraday, together with James Stodar, smelted dozens of alloys in the 1820s in search of the Damascus secret.

Mining engineer Pavel Anosov conducted hundreds of crucible smeltings at the Zlatoust arms factory in the 1830s, producing patterned damask steel. In 1841, he published a book, "On Damask Steel." In the 1990s, American materials scientist John Verhoeven and blacksmith Alfred Pendrai reproduced the banding in alloys similar to the ancient ones: the bands were found to be caused by trace amounts of vanadium, which caused the carbide to align in rows when forged at moderate temperatures.

In 2006, Peter Paufler’s team from the Technical University of Dresden found cementite nanowires and carbon nanotubes inside an ancient saber. The nanotubes grew naturally, in a crucible, on charcoal, without the aid of an electron microscope. Modern knives with a "Damascus" pattern are often welded imitation pieces made of layers, and the pattern is different.

The Roman builders’ stone behaved in the opposite way: the recipe was published openly, but the secret was hidden in the mixture itself.

Concrete that heals its own cracks

The dome of Rome’s Pantheon stands without a single steel rod. Its diameter reaches 43 meters and it is approximately nineteen centuries old.

The seaport blocks of Baiae and Caesarea Maritima have withstood the tides since the late first century BC, while today’s Portland cement piers deteriorate over decades, along with their rusting rebar. The secret, however, was in plain sight. Vitruvius, in his second book, "On Architecture," wrote down the proportions: lime, volcanic ash (pozzolana), seawater, and crushed stone. The name for the ash comes from the town of Pozzuoli near Naples. The addition of salt in the mixture was not a concern, and the Romans called the mixture opus caementicium, hence the word "cement."

In 2017, geologist Marie Jackson and colleagues described aluminum tobermorite crystals in marine blocks: the crystals grow in cracks for decades and fill them from the inside.

In 2023, MIT chemist Admir Masik demonstrated a second mechanism. When hot-mixed with quicklime, limestone lumps remain in the stone. Water flows into the crack, dissolves the lumps, and the solution recrystallizes, sealing the fracture. In the lab, the sample containing the lumps healed the crack within two weeks, while the control sample did not.

Heron did not hide his secrets, and the paradox with him turned out to be of a different kind.

Heron’s steam ball

The mechanic Heron described in his "Pneumatics" (1st century AD) a bronze ball on a pivot above a boiling cauldron. Steam escapes through two curved nozzles, causing the ball to spin. The principle is the same as that of a rocket: a jet of steam outwards, a thrust in the opposite direction. Vitruvius mentioned a similar vessel long before Heron.

The toy’s power is laughable. The replicas spin merrily, but the ball is powerless to pull a cart or a spindle. Economist Moses Finley explained why steam wasn’t taken seriously: with cheap slave labor, there was no market demand for such engines. The forges of that era couldn’t handle high-pressure boilers, and the mechanisms themselves were built for the sake of temple wonders.

Heron also collected other things. A fire on the altar opened the temple doors: heated air pressed on water in a closed vessel, the water flowed into a suspended bucket of counterweight, and ropes, bending around pulleys, pulled the doors. A coin dropped into a slot pressed a lever and opened a faucet with holy water. In the same "Pneumatica," singing birds, fountains, and self-acting altars stand next to the sphere.

The steam globe had nothing to do with the doors; the myth of steam-powered temple automation arose in modern times, as did the name "aeolipilus," named after the god of the winds, Aeolus. In 1629, the Italian Giovanni Branca drew a steam-powered vane in his book "Machines" — also without any use.

A pot from Baghdad is a completely different matter: a simple thing, but its purpose is questionable.

Copper cylinder in a clay jar

In 1936, a clay vessel about thirteen centimeters high was excavated near Baghdad. Inside was a cylinder made of a rolled-up copper plate, containing an iron rod, and the neck was filled with bitumen. Wilhelm König, a laboratory employee at the Baghdad Museum, proposed an interpretation in 1938: a galvanic cell, filled with wine vinegar, would produce about half a volt.

The replicas generate electricity. Skeptics respond concretely: no wires or galvanic coatings were found nearby, and gold was applied in ancient times using mercury. The closest relatives of such a vessel are scroll containers, dating between the Parthian and Sassanid centuries.

The purpose of the vessel remains unclear, and the dispute with the “lamp” from Dendera has gone even further: there is no object at all, but rather a drawing on the wall.

The Lamp of Dendera

A relief in the crypt of the Temple of Hathor has long been described in publications about "ancient aliens" as a depiction of a light bulb: a bulb, a base, and a wire. Egyptologists interpret the scene differently — the serpent god Hersomtus emerging from a lotus flower, alongside djeds and a baboon. Wires are absent from Egyptian texts and excavations; copper of that era was used for tools and vessels. Ordinary oil lamps were used in temples, and soot is found on ceilings.

A new era of industrial secrets opened in 18th-century Europe, with the alchemist as its captive.

White Gold and the Prisoner of Meissen

The Chinese brewed porcelain from white kaolin clay and petongze stone at temperatures exceeding 1200°C. By the Tang Dynasty, this had become a mature craft, and the composition and deposits were carefully preserved. The Italian word porcellana, "cowrie shell," stuck to the material for its smooth sheen. Europe spent centuries imitating it: at the Medici court in 1575, a soft paste without kaolin was brewed, and several dozen of those bowls survived.

The young alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger’s promise to smelt gold nearly cost him his life. The Prussian king demanded results, and in 1701, Böttger fled to Saxony, where he was intercepted by Elector Augustus the Strong. Augustus imprisoned the fugitive with the same request. From 1706, the prisoner lived in the Albrechtsburg fortress in Meissen, where he was assigned to conduct experiments with the scientist Ehrenfried Tschirnhausen, the owner of giant burning lenses.

Tschirnhausen died in the autumn of 1708, and that same year, combining kaolin with the right heat produced a white mass; in the spring of 1710, Augustus announced the manufactory. The formula was dismantled: each master knew his own part, an oath sealed silence, leaving Meissen was prohibited, and wages were paid royally. The first to emerge was the red stone mass, "Böttger stone," and only then the white one.

In 1717, Augustus exchanged one hundred and fifty-one Chinese vases for six hundred dragoons with the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I. The "Dragoon Vases" still stand in Dresden. By 1719, the recipe had made its way to Vienna with the fugitive master Samuel Stölzel. Böttger died that same year at the age of thirty-seven.

China also held the lead in instruments, and the compass chronology remains consistent only up to a certain point.

A spoon pointing to the south

A Han diviner would carve a spoon with a rounded bottom from lodestone and place it on a polished bronze plate. The handle would point south. The philosopher Wang Chong wrote in his first-century treatise, "The Analects," that if you place a sinan spoon on the ground, it will automatically turn its handle to the south. The Chinese called lodestone cishi, or "loving stone."

The spoon served as a divination tool; the board’s descendant, the geomancer’s disk, the lopan, still lives on in feng shui. The needle came later. In a 1088 treatise, Shen Kuo described a friction-magnetized needle, methods for suspending it, and a slight tilt to the east — a magnetic declination that Europe would discover for another four centuries.

Sailors appear in texts in 1119: Zhu Yu described ships navigating by compass in fog. The device reached Europe by the 12th century, with the first Western mention being by Alexander Neckam around 1190. The sources are blank on how the fortuneteller’s spoon became the chart box.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical search for immortality turned into a weapon.

The medicine that burst into flames

Around 850, a Taoist alchemist left a warning: if you mix sulfur, saltpeter, and honey in the same crucible, you’ll get a flash, burn your hands and face, and burn down your house. A manuscript containing this text has survived. Gunpowder is called huoyao in Chinese, "fire medicine"; the substance originated in a pharmacy where people were searching for the elixir of immortality.

By 1044, the military code "Wujing Zongyao" records three working recipes using saltpeter. For centuries, saltpeter had been boiled out of the manure-soaked walls of stables and dovecotes. Next came fire spears, tubes on shafts spitting flames. In 1232, besieged Kaifeng greeted the Mongols with cast-iron bombs "like thunder from heaven," exploding among the besiegers with a deafening roar.

The first combat use dates back to 904: during the siege of Yuzhang, a chronicler noted "flying fire." The Mongol campaigns brought the innovation west. In 1267, Roger Bacon hid its composition in an anagrammatic paragraph. Later chronicles attributed the invention of gunpowder to the monk Berthold of Schwarz; his biography has no documentary support. The first European depiction of a cannon is a 1326 drawing in a manuscript by Walter de Milemet: a pot-de-fer vase on trestles, with an arrow protruding from the muzzle.

Then chance turns from a companion of technology into its master.

Inventions from Dreams

Pharmacologist Otto Loewi woke up the night before Easter 1921 with a clear idea: nerves transmit commands to organs via chemical messengers, not sparks. He jotted down a few lines on a scrap of paper and fell asleep. In the morning, he couldn’t decipher his handwriting. The next night, the dream returned word for word, and before dawn, Loewi was in the lab: two isolated frog hearts, stimulating the vagus nerve of the first heart, and infusing circulatory fluid into the second. The second heart slowed down without any nerves.

The substance was named vagustoff, later identified as acetylcholine, and in 1936 Loewi received the Nobel Prize together with Henry Dale.

The situation with the periodic table is more ambiguous. Mineralogist Alexander Inostrantsev recalled a conversation in which Mendeleev spoke of a periodic table he saw in a dream, with elements falling into place. The scientist’s response was included in Inostrantsev’s memoirs:

“I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years, and you say: I sat there and suddenly… it’s ready!”

The first version of the periodic table was published by Mendeleev as a separate sheet in February 1869.

Mechanic Elias Howe, who struggled with his sewing machine for years, is credited with having another dream: he was captured by a fierce king, and the guards’ spears were pierced at the tip. Upon awakening, Howe moved the needle’s eye from the tail to the tip and patented the shuttle machine in 1846. No documentation of this dream survives, but the eye at the tip is listed in the patent.

At a benzene anniversary celebration in 1890, chemist August Kekulé told the audience that while dozing by the fireplace in Ghent, he saw a snake biting its own tail. This vision led to the idea of a closed benzene ring, and he had once glimpsed the chain of atoms while dozing on a London omnibus. No records of these naps survive, and the story was revealed to the public a quarter of a century later. He concluded:

"Learn to dream, gentlemen. Perhaps that’s how we’ll find the truth."

Dreams weren’t the only thing in the world; some discoveries came straight from faulty technology.

The resistor is of the wrong grade.

Charles Goodyear spent years in debt, pawning household goods and boiling rubber with any additives he could find, until, in the winter of 1839, according to his own account, a lump of sulfur-laced rubber fell onto a hot stove. The charred edge didn’t melt or stick. This was the beginning of vulcanization, for which Goodyear took out a patent in 1844. He died in 1860, leaving behind approximately two hundred thousand dollars in debt.

In 1945, Raytheon engineer Percival Spencer stood next to a live magnetron, the heart of military radar, and felt a candy bar in his pocket leak. He placed some corn kernels under it, and the popcorn popped. An egg exploded in a colleague’s face. The microwave oven application was submitted on October 8, 1945. The first model, produced in 1947, was as tall as a man, weighed 340 kilograms, required water cooling, and cost the buyer approximately five thousand dollars.

Wilson Greatbatch was building a heart rate recorder in 1956 and randomly pulled a one-megaohm resistor out of the box instead of a ten-kiloohm one. The circuit began beating pulses once per second, like a heart. Surgeon William Chardak implanted a similar device in a dog in 1958, and in 1960 in Buffalo, in an elderly patient. Greatbatch later wrote of providence.

A weak adhesive developed by 3M chemist Spencer Silver in 1968 was unused for three years until employee Arthur Fry inserted paper strips containing it into his hymnbook. Stickers went on sale in 1980. In 1938, Roy Plunkett opened a gas cylinder, supposedly empty, and found a white powder inside — Teflon.

Chance can throw up both a substance and a scandal.

Saccharin from unwashed hands

In 1879, chemist Konstantin Fahlberg was working in Ira Remsen’s laboratory on the oxidation of toluene. He sipped some bread at dinner and tasted the sweetness: his unwashed hands were stained by the experiments. The substance turned out to be approximately three hundred times sweeter than sugar. Fahlberg took the patent for saccharin alone, and Remsen spoke of his co-author in a letter without any respect:

"Falberg is a rogue. I’m annoyed that my name is placed next to his."

Color can hold a mystery no worse than a formula.

Mayan blue paint

The walls of Chichen Itza are painted with what chemists call Mayan blue. In the second half of the 20th century, two ingredients were discovered: plant indigo and palygorskite clay, whose channels seal the dye from fading. How the Indians came up with the idea of fusing the two remains a mystery. At the bottom of the Sacred Well, archaeologists found a layer of blue pigment mixed with clumps of aromatic copal resin and traces of sacrifices; the dye was also applied to the victims before they were thrown into the well.

Chemistry isn’t the only field of mystery. Sometimes, it’s the person themselves who disappears.

The man who got off the train

On October 14, 1888, a stroll through a garden near Leeds was filmed. The frame features the inventor’s son, Adolf, his father-in-law and mother-in-law, and a familiar governess. The film lasts less than three seconds. The photographer was Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman who had lived in England for twenty years, patented a single-lens camera using paper film, and was preparing a public showing of moving photographs in New York.

On September 16, 1890, he boarded a train from Dijon to Paris after visiting his brother. No one saw him again. Neither his body nor his suitcase.

Edison was promoting himself as the inventor of moving pictures at the time, and in a lawsuit from 1898 to 1902, an American court ruled that he had not created a film camera. Le Prince’s mother suspected a patent-related murder. In 2003, a photograph of a drowned man from 1890 resembling the inventor was found in the Paris police archives; the identity has not been established.

The mystery here develops into a dispute about primacy, and this dispute lasts longer than a human life.

Whose voice sounded first?

Phone in one day

On February 14, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office received two papers about the same device: Alexander Graham Bell’s application and Elisha Gray’s preliminary description. The filing procedure remains debated to this day. Bell received patent number 174,465, and on March 10, he was the first to speak into his own device, a phrase his assistant, Thomas Watson, heard through a wire in the next room.

Antonio Meucci, who had filed a notice of intent back in 1871 and was left without funds for an extension, also contested Bell’s claim. In 2002, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution recognizing his achievements; a few days later, the Canadian parliament came to Bell’s defense. Meucci himself died in 1889, long before these documents were passed.

Radio waves to the Supreme Court

Alexander Popov demonstrated a lightning discharge receiver on May 7, 1895. Guglielmo Marconi brought his devices to London in 1896 and soon received a British patent for wireless telegraphy. The 1909 Nobel Prize was shared by Marconi and Karl Braun. The rescue of fishermen in the Gulf of Finland near Gogland in early 1900 was carried out via Popov’s radio.

On June 21, 1943, the US Supreme Court invalidated Marconi’s key patents, citing the work of Oliver Lodge, Nikola Tesla, and John Stone. This also removed the issue of royalties from the US Department of Defense.

Television added another name. In 1926, Scotsman John Logie Baird demonstrated mechanical image transmission to London. In 1927, Philo Farnsworth transmitted a single, straight line image using a completely electronic circuit. In 1939, the Radio Corporation of America took over the license from an Idaho farmer’s son, having exhausted the courts. Farnsworth rarely turned on the television in his own home. According to his son, his father told him there was nothing to watch.