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7 Medieval Technologies So Advanced We Still Can't Beat Them - FULL MOVIES ENGLISH SUB
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00:00There is a piece of blue glass in northern France that is roughly 800 years old.
00:04It sits in a window in Chartres Cathedral, and every restorer who has ever stood in front of it,
00:10with every modern furnace and every mass spectrometer and every chemical archive available to 21st century glassmaking,
00:17has admitted the same uncomfortable thing.
00:19They cannot make it again.
00:21Not exactly.
00:22Not the way the medieval craftsmen did.
00:24That is one example.
00:25There are six more in this video, and each one is stranger than the last.
00:29These are not myths.
00:30These are not legends polished by time.
00:33These are physical objects, sitting in museums and cathedrals and laboratory archives right now,
00:38that medieval engineers and physicians and metallurgists produced,
00:43and that we, with all our modern advantages, still cannot fully reproduce.
00:48Some of the formulas died with their inventors.
00:51Some of them survive on parchment, but refuse to work the way the originals did.
00:56And in at least one case, a thousand-year-old recipe has just outperformed a modern antibiotic in a laboratory
01:03at a major British university.
01:05If you find that ordinary documentaries tell this kind of story too flatly, subscribe.
01:10This channel goes where the textbooks stop.
01:12We are starting with the blue, number one.
01:15The blue of Chartres.
01:17The first item is a color.
01:19Specifically, a deep, luminous, almost otherworldly blue that floods the interior of Chartres Cathedral
01:26whenever the sun comes through the western windows.
01:28The locals call it bleu de Chartres.
01:31The art historians call it impossible to perfectly replicate.
01:35Here is what we know.
01:36The oldest of the surviving Chartres windows date to roughly 1145,
01:41with most of the great ensemble made between 1205 and 1240.
01:46Tests on the original glass show a sodic flux colored with cobalt oxide.
01:51That much is reproducible.
01:52The chemistry is not the secret.
01:54The secret is everything else.
01:56The medieval glass at Chartres is uneven, riddled with bubbles, dust motes,
02:02fragments of leaves that fell into the molten batch 800 years ago.
02:06The panes are nearly an inch thick.
02:08The cobalt itself was sourced from far-off mines in Eastern Europe,
02:12mixed with manganese in proportions specific to the period,
02:16and worked by craftsmen using a technique of irregular hand-blowing
02:20that produced a surface like rolling hills under your fingertip.
02:23And here is the problem.
02:25The Canterbury Cathedral Conservation Department has stated, on the record,
02:29that they have been searching for a glassmaker
02:31who can blow glass unevenly enough to match the medieval panes,
02:35and they have not found one.
02:37Modern glassblowers are too good.
02:40Their work is too flat.
02:41The shimmer that the medieval craftsmen achieved through controlled imperfection
02:45cannot be reverse-engineered,
02:47because we no longer have the imperfections.
02:50The cobalt has been refined.
02:52The sand has been purified.
02:55The technique that made the blue glow died with the workshops that made it.
02:59Why does a 13th century blue refuse to be matched by every restoration glass we have made?
03:05The official answer is that it is a matter of source materials
03:08and trade routes that no longer exist.
03:11The honest answer is that we know the chemistry,
03:14we know the recipe,
03:15and we still cannot produce the same effect.
03:17The artifact is real.
03:19The method is gone.
03:20From a color we cannot reproduce,
03:22we cross to a metal we cannot reforge.
03:25Number two.
03:26Damascus steel.
03:28Or, more precisely,
03:30the Wootz Crucible steel of the medieval Islamic world.
03:33Forge a blade in Damascus or Toledo,
03:36or somewhere along the Indian trade corridor any time between roughly the 3rd and the 18th century,
03:41and you might end up with something extraordinary.
03:44The steel had a surface pattern, a watered look, sometimes called the ladder, or the rose,
03:50that ran through the body of the blade as structure rather than decoration.
03:53The blades were famously hard, famously sharp, famously springy in a way that early European steel was not.
04:01The recipes for making them, Wootz ingots imported from South India,
04:05smelted with specific plant additives and sealed crucibles,
04:09were passed master to apprentice for over a thousand years.
04:12And then, around the early 19th century, the chain broke.
04:17The traditional formula was lost, not stolen, not suppressed, lost.
04:22The masters who knew it died without passing it on,
04:25or the trade in raw Wootz collapsed, or both.
04:28By the time European metallurgists with microscopes started looking at surviving Damascus blades,
04:33they could see what they were looking at, and they still could not reproduce it.
04:37Modern materials, science has come closer.
04:40Researchers in the early 2000s identified carbon nanotubes and cementite nanowires inside surviving Wootz blades,
04:48structures we now associate with cutting-edge nanotechnology,
04:52formed accidentally by medieval smiths working with crucible temperatures,
04:57specific impurities, and a forging cycle whose timing was guarded as a craft secret.
05:02The blades, in other words, contained nanostructures centuries ahead of the science that would eventually name them.
05:08Picture that.
05:09A smith in 12th century Damascus, working a glowing crucible with no more than the inherited memory of his master's
05:17master,
05:18producing a blade with internal architecture that 20th century physicists would need an electron microscope to even see.
05:25We can describe what they made.
05:27We still argue about exactly how they made it.
05:29If the blue defied us with light, the steel defies us with structure.
05:34The next case defies us with fire.
05:36Number 3. Greek fire.
05:39The Byzantines had a weapon.
05:41They guarded the formula like a state secret.
05:43Which it was.
05:44Around the year 672, an engineer named Kalinikos of Heliopolis presented the formula to the imperial court at Constantinople.
05:54And from that point onward, for nearly 800 years, Byzantine warships could spray a burning liquid onto enemy fleets that
06:01water could not extinguish,
06:03that clung to wooden hulls, that reportedly burned on the surface of the sea itself, Arab fleets that had been
06:09advancing on Constantinople were turned back by it.
06:12Russian fleets were destroyed by it.
06:14Crusader chroniclers wrote about it with a mixture of horror and awe.
06:18The recipe was held by a single family of imperial engineers and a handful of trusted court officials.
06:24The components were prepared in secret.
06:27Even the delivery system, bronze siphons mounted on the prows of ships, pressurized by pumps and ignited at the nozzle,
06:34was treated as classified military technology.
06:37And then, in 1453, when Constantinople fell, the formula vanished.
06:43Not gradually, not through neglect.
06:46Vanished.
06:47The chroniclers who survived the siege did not write it down.
06:50The engineers either died or kept their oath.
06:54By the time scholars in the 17th century began reconstructing what Greek fire might have been, the trail had gone
07:01cold by 200 years.
07:03We have theories.
07:04Crude petroleum from naturally occurring seeps near the Black Sea, mixed with quicklime, perhaps with sulfur, perhaps with resin or
07:12naphtha.
07:13The candidates are listed in every history of medieval warfare.
07:17Modern attempts to reconstruct it have produced incendiaries that work, sort of, in the right conditions, sometimes.
07:23None of them does what the chronicles say Greek fire did.
07:27None of them burns on the surface of seawater, the way Anna Kalmneny described.
07:31None of them fits all the eyewitness accounts at once.
07:35What we know is that the formula was lost.
07:37What we suspect is that the loss was deliberate.
07:40From a fire we cannot reignite.
07:42We drop to a material that has been quietly outlasting us for 2,000 years.
07:47Number 4.
07:48Self-healing concrete.
07:50Roman in origin, in continuous medieval use across the parts of Italy and the Mediterranean, where the Roman recipe never
07:57fully died, and only properly understood by modern science in 2023.
08:02Here is the puzzle that bothered engineers for generations.
08:05The pantheon, completed in roughly 126 of the Common Era, is still standing.
08:11Its dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome on Earth.
08:15Roman aqueducts, harbors, breakwaters that have been pounded by saltwater for 2,000 years are still functionally intact.
08:24Modern concrete, by comparison, has a service life of around 50 to 100 years before it begins to crumble.
08:30We pour millions of tons of it every year.
08:34It does not last.
08:35For decades, scholars looked at the white chunks scattered throughout Roman and medieval Roman-style mortars, the so-called lime
08:43clasts, and dismissed them as evidence of sloppy mixing.
08:46Poor quality control, the textbooks said.
08:49Lazy workmanship.
08:51Where are you watching from?
08:52Drop your country in the comments.
08:54The pantheon's dome was big news once, and the story is still traveling.
08:58The textbooks were wrong about the lime clasts.
09:02In January 2023, a team led by Admir Masich at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with colleagues at Harvard
09:10and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, published the answer in Science Advances.
09:15The lime clasts were not mistakes.
09:17They were a feature.
09:18The Romans and the medieval builders who inherited the recipe in places like Ravenna and parts of southern Italy were
09:25using a technique called hot mixing, adding quicklime, in its raw and reactive state, directly into the dry mix before
09:33water was introduced.
09:34The reaction released heat, trapped reactive calcium inside small porous nodules throughout the matrix, and produced concrete with a self
09:43-healing mechanism built into its structure.
09:45When a micro-crack forms, water seeps in, reaches one of the lime clasts, dissolves it, and the calcium-saturated
09:53solution flows into the crack and recrystallizes as fresh calcium carbonate.
09:57The material seals itself.
10:00The MIT team reproduced the effect in the lab.
10:03Cracks in their hot mix samples healed completely within two weeks of water exposure.
10:08Modern concrete, made with the slaked lime that replaced the Roman method centuries ago, simply cracks and stays cracked.
10:16We have only just begun to engineer concrete that approaches what they did by inheritance, and we are not there
10:22yet.
10:23From a building material we are still trying to catch up with, we cross to a medicine.
10:28Number 5.
10:29Bald's Eyesolve.
10:31There is an old English manuscript in the British Library called Bald's Leech Book.
10:35It dates to the 9th century.
10:37Among hundreds of recipes for what we would call early medieval medicine.
10:41The sorts of things academic historians use to dismiss as superstition mixed with folk practice.
10:48There is a remedy for a stye, an infection of the eyelid.
10:51The instructions are precise.
10:53Take garlic and another allium, probably onion or leek.
10:57Crush them together.
10:59Add wine.
11:00Add bovine bile.
11:01Mix in a brass vessel.
11:03Let stand for nine days.
11:05Strain.
11:06Apply.
11:06For roughly a thousand years, this was the kind of recipe that classically trained physicians would have politely set aside.
11:13In 2015, an interdisciplinary team at the University of Nottingham, led by the medievalist Christina Lee, working with microbiologists, decided
11:23to actually make it.
11:24They followed the manuscript exactly.
11:26Real garlic, real onion, real wine of the sort the recipe described, real ox bile from a butcher, nine days,
11:34brass vessel, strain.
11:36Then they tested it on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA, the hospital superbug that has killed hundreds of thousands of
11:47people in the modern era because our antibiotics no longer reliably touch it.
11:51The medieval eye-solve killed it, not partially.
11:55In the laboratory cultures, it produced reductions in viable MRSA cell counts that all competitive modern antibiotics struggle to match.
12:04A follow-up study at the University of Warwick in 2020, published in Scientific Reports, confirmed and extended the result
12:12against multiple drug-resistant biofilms.
12:15The full recipe worked.
12:16Garlic alone did not.
12:18Onion alone did not.
12:19The combination, fermented for exactly the time the manuscript specified, in exactly the vessel it specified, produced a synergistic effect
12:28that no single ingredient could explain.
12:31A 9th century Anglo-Saxon manuscript contains a working antibiotic against one of the most feared superbugs of the 21st
12:39century.
12:39We did not know that until 11 years ago.
12:42What else is sitting in those manuscripts that we have not yet bothered to reconstruct?
12:47From a recipe that survives, we cross to a machine that should not exist.
12:55In the year 1206, in what is now eastern Turkey, an engineer named Ismail ibn al-Razaz al-Jazari completed
13:04a manuscript called The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.
13:09It contained detailed engineering drawings, exploded views, exact dimensions, material specifications, for over 50 machines that he had personally designed
13:19and built for the Artukit court.
13:21Some of these machines were practical, water-raising pumps, irrigation systems, clocks.
13:26Others were not.
13:28Al-Jazari built programmable musical automata, robotic drummers and musicians arranged on a boat, performing different rhythms that could be
13:37reprogrammed by changing the position of pegs on a rotating drum.
13:41He built a hand-washing device for the sultan, in which a robotic servant offered a basin, then a towel
13:46in correct sequence.
13:48He built a peacock fountain that automatically dispensed soap and water in a programmed cycle.
13:53Look at the drawings.
13:55Modern historians of engineering, including the American mechanical engineer Donald Hill, who translated the manuscript in 1974, have noted that
14:04Al-Jazari was not just building toys.
14:07He was using camshafts, segmental gears, crankshafts, escapement mechanisms, and closed-loop feedback systems centuries before they appeared in European
14:17engineering.
14:17His programmable drum, with its rearrangeable pegs, is now widely cited as the first known programmable machine in history.
14:25The principle is the same one that, 800 years later, would be used to encode instructions in early computers.
14:32A medieval Islamic engineer, working at the Artukit court in 1206, built a programmable robot.
14:38Reread that sentence.
14:40The textbook account is that,
14:42Programmable machines are a modern invention.
14:44The artifact is real.
14:46The book survives.
14:47The drawings are detailed enough that modern engineers have rebuilt several of his devices,
14:51and confirmed that they work exactly as described.
14:55We did not invent automation in the 18th or 19th century.
14:58We rediscovered it.
15:00And after 800 years of rediscovery, we are not even at the strangest case in this video.
15:05The seventh entry is a measuring instrument that fits in your hand,
15:08and is more accurate than the textbooks said it should be.
15:11Number seven, the medieval astrolabe.
15:14An astrolabe is a flat brass disc, about the size of a dinner plate,
15:19engraved with concentric circles and rotating dials that allow its user to perform computations,
15:24involving the positions of the sun, the stars, the time of day, the time of year,
15:30the latitude of the observer, and the direction of any celestial body above the horizon.
15:35The instrument is medieval Islamic in its developed form,
15:38refined in workshops in Baghdad, Damascus, Toledo, and Moraga between roughly the 8th and the 14th centuries.
15:46By 1300, an experienced astronomer with a good astrolabe could fix his position,
15:52determine the local time to within a few minutes,
15:55find the direction of Mecca,
15:56and predict the apparent positions of major stars for any night of the year.
16:01Here is the part that gets understated in textbooks.
16:04Surviving astrolabes from the great workshops,
16:07the Andalusian instruments by Ibrahim ibn Sayyid,
16:11the Persian instruments from Moraga,
16:13the Mamluk instruments now scattered between the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and the Smithsonian,
16:20have been measured by modern metrologists.
16:22The angular errors on the best surviving examples are, in many cases, less than one degree of arc.
16:28Some are accurate to within fractions of a degree,
16:31engraved by hand with chisels and dividers,
16:34on brass plates,
16:35by craftsmen working without magnification,
16:38without precision machine tools,
16:40without modern alloys.
16:42A modern toolmaker,
16:43asked to reproduce the engraving accuracy of a 14th century Moraga astrolabe by hand,
16:49would consider the request unreasonable.
16:51The medieval makers did it routinely,
16:54and they did it for instruments that ordinary scholars and navigators carried in leather pouches as standard equipment.
17:01The textbook explanation is that medieval Islamic mathematics,
17:05geometry,
17:06and observational astronomy were highly advanced,
17:09which is true.
17:10The harder question is the one nobody asks.
17:13How did the craftsmen achieve those tolerances?
17:15The answer is that we are not entirely sure.
17:18The workshop traditions were oral.
17:20The masters trained the apprentices by showing, not by writing.
17:23When the workshops closed, the methods went with them.
17:26You can hold one of these instruments today,
17:28in a museum case in Oxford or Cambridge or Istanbul.
17:32Look at the engraving.
17:33Then ask yourself how a hand and a chisel produced a circle divided into degrees
17:38that a modern laser-cut instrument would barely improve on.
17:41Seven cases.
17:42Seven medieval technologies that modern science either cannot replicate,
17:47has only recently understood,
17:48or has had to reverse engineer from physical artifacts
17:51because the original method was deliberately or accidentally lost.
17:55What ties them together is not magic.
17:58It is something more uncomfortable.
18:00Each of these technologies was the product of a long, patient, hands-on tradition.
18:05Masters training apprentices for generations.
18:08Recipes guarded by specific families or workshops.
18:11Knowledge passed orally because writing it down was either dangerous or unnecessary
18:15when the chain of transmission was unbroken.
18:18And then the chain broke.
18:20A city fell.
18:21A workshop closed.
18:23A formula died with its keeper.
18:25The artifacts survived, sitting in a museum or a cathedral or a manuscript archive,
18:31while the method that produced it slipped out of human knowledge.
18:34We are very good in the modern world at writing things down.
18:38We are not always so good at maintaining the kind of living, unbroken,
18:42master-to-apprentice tradition that produced the blue of Chartres
18:45or the pattern of a Wootz blade or the precise tolerances on a Moraga astrolabe.
18:51The medieval world ran on those traditions.
18:53When it ended, some of what it knew ended with it.
18:57Of the seven cases we walk through, which one unsettles you most?
19:01The blue we cannot quite match.
19:03The steel with nanostructures inside it.
19:06The fire that burned on water.
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