You have to wonder how many inventions which could have changed the way we live were forgotten about over the years. When archaeologists dug up the Antikythera mechanism, which was an ancient computer run on gears, it laid in a museum for about 100 years. It had been covered with hardened sediment from the ocean. No one realized what it was in all that time until one person was able to figure out it was a complicated computer. It was found on a shipwreck from 60 B.C. and now some scientists are saying they think it was an antique when it was put on the ship. They believe it came from Syracuse and Archimedes who was perhaps the smartest person who ever lived, had built it or at least helped. We are talking about something which has precisely cut gears thousands of years before they ever appeared in history. Something else was found on the device and it was an inscription which could indicate Hipparchus, an ancient astronomer from Rhodes who died in 120 B.C. had something to do with it, we really don’t know. What we do know is ancients were construction devices which couldn’t be equaled until at least the 16th century A.D.

What if this device would have become popular? It would have led to many other things being invented. Clocks would have appeared in the ancient world. I am talking about mechanical clocks not water clocks or anything like that. With the invention of gears perhaps it would have led to transmissions and engines and even trains and steam powered ships. After all another ancient invention was steam power. It had been used for things like opening temple doors in ancient Greece and powering statues to move in a simple way and yet this invention also never took hold. Apparently the potential of steam power was never realized by the ancient inventor Hero of Alexandria when he invented the aeolipile, a simple device which turned from jets of steam when heated over a fire and the water inside it turned to steam. Those who saw it didn’t realize its potential either. What a shame. We could have been 1700 years ahead of where we are today in technology if those ancient Greeks took advantage of steam power.

There are a lot of droughts all over the earth today. Many scientists will tell you much of it is due to global warming and most of the world will accept this explanation except for many of our politicians who will not because lobbyists tell them not to. There was supposedly a device invented by Wihelm Reich which was said to have successfully caused rain when it was tested in the 1950s. It was said his machine used Orgone energy. The U.S. government says there is no such thing. When a drought threatened Maine’s blueberry crop in 1953 Reich set up his equipment on July 6, 1953 and caused it to rain on July 7, 1953 after the weather bureau said there was no rain in the foreseeable forecast.  Reich ordered his work to be locked away until 50 years after his death. Reich was sent to jail for having objectionable material. His invention was banned by the food and drug administration and destroyed. This is said today to be one of the favorite ways to frame someone and get them out of the way. Was there more to Orgone energy than its use for controlling the weather? If we could cure droughts everywhere the earth would be much better off.

Nikola Tesla has become a much more well-known figure of late. He is perhaps one of the smartest scientists, engineers and inventors who ever lived. When he heard the United States was going to start the Manhattan project, the development of an atomic bomb, he approached the government and told them he had developed a death ray which would have done the job just as well. He had developed in the 1930s and said he could pump high powered electricity at a target anywhere in the world killing everyone in a large area. It was said the invention could also shoot planes out of the air from at least 250 miles away. There is much speculation on what the invention was. Some think laser other think particle beam weapon and still others think it had something to do with his work with cosmic rays. The invention disappeared when he died. What a coincidence! Could it be this invention was too good and too cheap to reproduce making it too hard for the military industrial complex to sell its ultra-expensive weapons so it had to disappear?

A Roman inventor in the time of Caesar presented his invention before Caesar and was immediately executed. What had been his great crime? He had invented shatter proof glass. When the glass was dropped it would only show a slight dent at the most. So why in the world did Caesar kill the inventor and destroy his invention? Caesar thought shatter proof glass would somehow devalue the price of gold and silver if it go into the hands of the general public. This glass could have changed a lot of things in history and maybe even led to the development of glass armor for windows and such in buildings and castles and hastened the development of special types of glass used to withstand great pressure and it spacecraft among other things.

One secret weapon from antiquity was Greek Fire. It was a terror weapon which was feared by all. Greek Fire would burn on water and the harder you tried to put it out the same or worse it would become. It was extremely deadly during a naval battle and was the nuclear weapon of its day. The secret of its makeup was so well guarded that we no longer know how it was made. We do have a modern equivalent of this weapon and it is napalm. Some say when napalm was being developed for use in World War II, the idea had come from Greek Fire.

The first basic element of a telescope could be a lot older than we think it is. 3,000 years ago a piece of rock crystal was formed into a magnifying glass and this took place in the Assyrian palace of Nimrud in what is known today as Iraq. Its use is not clear. We don’t know if it was first used to look at the heavens or used to magnify text or for work with tiny elements of jewelry. It is equivalent to about 3X power. One other use which was proposed was that it was used to start fires using the sun’s rays. A prominent Italian professor said he believes it was part of a telescope and explains how the Assyrians knew so much about astronomy. If this is true and the Assyrians had at least one telescope it is a shame no one who saw it ever duplicated it. Who knows how much further ahead in astronomy we would have been by today if this had happened.