This show is concerned with technology from history that was either ahead of its time and subsequently forgotten, or artefacts which are mysteries in themselves. This includes the Baghdad Battery, where German scientist Arne Eggebrecht is shown electroplating a small silver statue with a gold cyanide solution and a replica of the battery using grape juice. There are also segments on the Antikythera Mechanism (including an interview with Derek J. de Solla Price), the Stone Balls of Costa Rica and the so-called 'Skull of Doom' which dominates the opening credits of the series. Also included are the vitrified stone forts of Scotland including Tap o' Noth near Aberdeen. Clarke opines at the end that had some of these forgotten technologies been developed and not lost that it would now be like it was the year 4000 AD and that we would have already 'colonised the stars'.
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TVTranscript
00:00How did men find the technology 2,500 years ago to melt rock and turn their hilltop fortresses
00:28into impregnable glass?
00:34Can this German scientist justify his astonishing claim that these relics are an electric battery
00:41invented long before the birth of Christ?
00:43The remarkable thing is that these objects are 2,200 years old.
00:48That means 2,000 years before electricity was invented in Europe, in Italy.
00:56In Athens, has this distinguished professor found irrefutable evidence of ancient wisdom?
01:04Can it be that in the heart of this fragment, lost from a ship 2,000 years ago, lie hidden
01:11the cogwheels of the world's first computer?
01:16Mysteries from the Files of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communications
01:21satellite.
01:22Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, after a lifetime of science, space, and writing, he ponders
01:27the riddles of this and other worlds.
01:32A lot of rubbish has been written about mysterious knowledge possessed by the ancients.
01:38They didn't need any help from visitors from outer space to do this sort of thing.
01:44Part of a vast irrigation system built in 700 AD, still in full working order, with
01:52a little assistance from modern engineers.
01:55But there's nothing mysterious about it.
01:57We know exactly when it was done, 13 centuries ago.
02:01We even know the names of the builders.
02:04On the other hand, there are some relics from the past which are truly mysterious, because
02:09they challenge our ideas about the level of technology that existed at the time.
02:15There are also some things from the past which, though they may not challenge any of our existing
02:20concepts, are still puzzling and enigmatic.
02:51Heathrow Airport, London.
03:02Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges, newly arrived from Toronto, Canada.
03:07With her in her green bag, she has brought one of the greatest jewels in the world.
03:12A headache for the security men, and half a million dollars' worth of mystery.
03:21Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges.
03:29In London, the tangled story of her sinister treasure may at last be unravelled.
03:35She found it herself in a lost city when she was a girl.
03:40My father was excavating in Central America, British Honduras, and we found an old ruin,
03:47Maya, who he thought had something to do with Atlantis.
03:52We excavated for about seven years, clearing the ground, and then one day we spotted something
03:58shining through the stones, and that was my 17th birthday.
04:03So we were full of happiness and joy.
04:07I'm bringing it to London because I want the British Museum to have a test at it
04:13and to find out more of its history, if we can.
04:28Burlington Gardens, near Piccadilly Circus.
04:33Burlington Gardens, near Piccadilly Circus.
04:36Few of the works of art brought here for analysis at the Museum of Mankind
04:40present a challenge as great and as frustrating to the experts
04:44as the one Anna Mitchell-Hedges unveils in the laboratories in the depths of the building.
04:51This is the weirdest gem in the world, the Skull of Doom.
04:57The circumstances of its discovery were bizarre.
05:00Its origin is unknown, and its powers, some say, are fatal.
05:08The Maya people say it was used to make weapons.
05:13The Maya people say it was used to will death or to heal.
05:18And like if an old medicine man or a witch doctor
05:23was getting too old to perform a ceremony,
05:26a young man was chosen and both laid in front of the altar
05:31and the high priest would perform a ceremony
05:35and the old man's knowledge would go into the young man's body.
05:40And the old man's knowledge would go into this young boy
05:44and the old man would pass away peacefully,
05:47but this young boy would get up as a very knowledgeable young man.
05:52This crystal skull here has tremendous power,
05:56but it also gives you a warning that something's going to happen.
06:02To Anna's father, the crystal skull was the strangest trophy
06:06in a lifetime of adventure.
06:08Mike Mitchell-Hedges, explorer and celebrity of the 20s,
06:12was a man who'd take on a crocodile before breakfast
06:16and before donning his trousers.
06:18Primitive tribes offered him their choicest brides
06:21and hailed him as a god.
06:23And using only a rod and line,
06:25he reeled in some of the great and monstrous creatures
06:29of the oceans.
06:31In 1924, in British Honduras,
06:34he found his buried city, Lubantun.
06:37Mitchell-Hedges believed it was part of the lost Atlantis.
06:41With the local people, the Maya,
06:43he cleared the jungle from Lubantun's pyramids and platforms.
06:47On the last of these expeditions,
06:49he brought Anna, his adopted daughter, to the city.
06:53It was on her 17th birthday
06:55that they first glimpsed the crystal skull
06:58amidst the fallen stones.
07:00For days, we kept seeing something shining through the stones
07:04where the sun was giving,
07:06and, of course, we were anxious to get to that one spot.
07:10I went to pick it up because I had smaller hands
07:13than the other people did,
07:15and I picked it up and showed it to my father,
07:18and he just couldn't believe that we found the crystal skull.
07:22As you see, it's got all the little lumps
07:25that you have on your own head,
07:27and if you look deep down in the eyes,
07:30you'll see sockets down in the eyes,
07:33and the jaw moves like a human jaw.
07:36Almost from the day of its discovery,
07:39this, the largest worked gemstone in the world,
07:42has been a mystery.
07:44Thomas Gann, who was there,
07:46and Lady Richmond Brown stayed silent.
07:49Mitchell Hedges simply said,
07:51it is the embodiment of all evil.
07:54But the question remains,
07:56was it really an ancient symbol of death
07:59that took generations to fashion,
08:01or could it have been modern?
08:03The only hint lies in an uncannily similar
08:06but less intricate skull
08:08in the care of the Museum of Mankind in London.
08:11It was bought from Tiffany's, the New York jewelers, in 1898,
08:15property, it was said, of a Mexican soldier of fortune.
08:19Rock crystal is impossible to date,
08:22but the Tiffany skull does bear a faint trace
08:25which could betray the moment
08:27when a modern cutting tool accidentally slipped.
08:35The tests begin on the Mitchell Hedges skull.
08:38It has weighed in water and in air.
08:42The result, it's genuinely pure quartz rock crystal.
08:50Oh, that's very nice indeed.
08:522.65, which is just what it should be.
08:55That's absolutely grand.
08:57There are no tell-tale scratches on this flawless surface
09:01to help top gem expert Alan Jobbins date the skull of doom.
09:05We see no positive evidence on it that the metal has been used.
09:09There's no positive evidence of that,
09:11but it may have been very skilfully concealed.
09:14It's a skilful, sophisticated job.
09:17If it's made by primitive people, it's absolutely amazing,
09:21because the standard of workmanship is absolutely first class.
09:25It must have taken anybody who made this a very good job
09:29to make it look like this.
09:31The standard of workmanship is absolutely first class.
09:34It must have taken anybody who made this
09:37a very considerable length of time,
09:39even if he were using modern diamond tools
09:42and every modern device that was available to him.
09:45The most likely source for quarrying
09:47such a large and immaculate block of crystal would be Brazil.
09:51But where and when it was worked are pure guesswork.
09:54Whether it was worked in Honduras or Mexico
09:57or whether it was worked in Europe or Japan or China,
10:01I wouldn't care to say. I just wouldn't.
10:04In terms of mystery concerning their origins,
10:07I think it's likely to remain a mystery for a very long time.
10:11I mean, the probability is that the material came from Brazil
10:15and it came from Brazil probably post-1700, sometime like that.
10:21But Alan Jobbins' theory
10:24totally disagrees.
10:30The skull was made long before that, about 3,600 years ago.
10:35This is what the Maya people told us.
10:38I lived seven years with the Maya people as a child
10:42and I lived and ate and slept the same way they slept, on the earth.
10:48And once you live with people
10:51who are so down to nature, you've got to believe them.
11:00But what are we to believe
11:02about the strange vitrified forts of Scotland?
11:07The Iron Age hill fort of Taponoth,
11:10more than 1,800 feet up in the hills of Aberdeenshire.
11:14Ian Ralston is one of countless archaeologists
11:17who have climbed to this cold summit,
11:19seeking to explain why the fort's high walls
11:22are built not of loose stones but, strangely, of melted rock,
11:26rock that will melt only at furnace heat,
11:29more than 1,000 degrees centigrade.
11:32It's absolutely solid.
11:34In places one can kick it, it won't disintegrate.
11:37It's as if it's cemented together.
11:39In fact, what appears to have happened
11:41is that at some stage, presumably with great heat,
11:44the rocks have melted, or at least partly melted.
11:47And here, for example, we can see one bit
11:49where the rock has gone really glassy.
11:51It's been absolutely molten here at some stage.
11:55One fort where the walls have vitrified,
11:58or turned to a kind of glass, would be strange enough.
12:01But Taponoth is one of at least 50 scattered throughout Scotland,
12:05and no-one has yet managed to explain whether the rock walls,
12:09sometimes hundreds of feet long,
12:11were melted accidentally, perhaps in battle,
12:14or whether the fort builders used some technique now lost
12:17to strengthen the walls by welding the rock together.
12:22Ian Ralston, in an ambitious attempt to crack the mystery,
12:26decided to build his own Iron Age fort.
12:33The idea here is that we hope to reconstruct
12:36what one of these walls looked like before it was vitrified.
12:40We know that these walls must contain considerable quantities
12:43of large timber beams.
12:45These have been recorded, and sometimes they also turn up
12:48on the forts that have been vitrified.
12:51Professional dry stone wallers toiled for days
12:54to build the wall of rocks laced with timber.
12:57For the wall itself to catch fire,
12:59tonnes of loose timber must have been stacked against the face.
13:04WHIRRING
13:12This, as regards authenticity, I think is a very good attempt
13:16at one of these walls.
13:18Of course, the main thing is it's only part of the circuit of a defence.
13:22We've only built something like six or eight metres in length,
13:26so it's a part model, but that part, I think, is fairly accurate.
13:34Lovely.
13:39Within minutes of the fire being lit,
13:41the wood stacked on the outside is well alight.
13:58Within an hour, the framework of wooden beams has caught fire,
14:02carrying the flames to the heart of the wall.
14:04It is here, in the centre, that enough heat may build up
14:07to melt the stones.
14:09Outside, they are already beginning to crack.
14:20After several hours and many tonnes of wood,
14:23a load of old furniture has to be commandeered from the local dustmen.
14:27It is the only way to keep the temperature up.
14:31Later, yet another consignment of wood, the sixth of the day,
14:34arrives to keep the fires burning.
14:38As night falls over Aberdeen, weary helpers begin to realise
14:42the true extent of the mystery of the vitrified forts.
14:46To wonder not only how the fort builders could achieve
14:49the searing temperatures needed to melt the rock,
14:52but how they managed to drag vast quantities of wood
14:55up to the hilltops with only primitive transport.
15:01MUSIC PLAYS
15:06The morning after, and deep inside the wall,
15:09the fort is still burning.
15:1722 hours after the fire was first lit,
15:20it's time to demolish the wall
15:22and see whether the stones at its core have melted.
15:26At first sight, the result looks disappointing.
15:29There are no ramparts of fused stone.
15:32The search is now on for evidence that any rocks have melted.
15:36Yeah, that's it.
15:38The rock here has melted completely.
15:41Look, it's bubbled on one side.
15:43Great.
15:46God, it's hot.
15:53We've been able to show that at least a very small quantity,
15:57in the case of this wall, of the rock,
16:00has indeed melted and then re-solidified.
16:03Some of the samples are here, little pieces of rock.
16:07We've no great chunks of vitrified material,
16:10but here, for example, one with a bit of granite
16:13where a lot of material is soldered onto it in this position,
16:16and this other one is one which has gone really glassy on the surface,
16:20the vitrified effects,
16:22and you see perhaps when we move it round in the light
16:25that this is it on this face.
16:31But the mystery of Tappanoth and the other vitrified forts of Scotland
16:35has survived the experiments of the modern archaeologists.
16:39For all their expertise and the tonnes of wood they burnt,
16:43the 20th century fort builders produced only a handful of melted rock
16:47and no real answers.
16:49Beyond the conviction that the walls of this great castle
16:52must have been fused together as a deliberate act
16:55by people who dragged forests to mountaintops like this,
16:58there is nothing to explain
17:00why they set the hills alight 2,500 years ago.
17:04This experiment suggests
17:06it would have taken half the trees in Scotland
17:09to vitrify all the forts.
17:11So we've only deepened the mystery.
17:13Such things as the crystal skull and vitrified forts
17:17are intriguing and puzzling,
17:19but they don't shake our preconceived ideas about history.
17:23Yet there are other artefacts which do just that,
17:27if they are what they seem to be.
17:30This man, Dr Arne Egerbrecht, director of a West German museum,
17:34has no doubt at all that there is at least
17:37one astonishing example of ancient technology
17:40which is 2,000 years ahead of its time.
17:43He found it in an exhibition of treasures from ancient Iraq,
17:47a pottery jar, a copper cylinder,
17:50and an iron rod discovered in Baghdad.
17:53He believes they are components of an electric battery,
17:57made 2,000 years before batteries were invented in the West.
18:05I decided to check it,
18:08and for that purpose we got made a replica.
18:12Here you see the replica, the Baghdad battery.
18:16You see here a ceramic pot,
18:19you see a copper cylinder,
18:21and you see the iron rod here.
18:24All replicas.
18:27Now I have here a voltmeter.
18:33And this voltmeter shows on the scale
18:36a distance from 0, a quarter of a volt,
18:39to half a volt here,
18:41which we should reach by this battery.
18:44For that purpose I combine now
18:47the voltmeter and the battery with these wires.
18:51Now one wire is fixed to the rod,
18:54the other one is fixed to the copper cylinder.
18:58To get it to work we need only some acid,
19:02and for that purpose a bunch of grapes
19:05should help us and should do it.
19:08Here I have the grapes and here a glass,
19:12and in this I'm putting now some of the grapes.
19:18And with a wooden stick
19:21I am pressing the juice out of it.
19:28I hope I get enough
19:31so that we see on the scale
19:34how the voltmeter is working.
19:42The grape acid battery delivers almost half a volt.
19:48Could it have been used for gilding ancient treasure?
19:52To show you that this can be done with this battery,
19:56I prepared an experiment.
20:02The trick is to take a piece of copper wire,
20:07the technique may have been
20:10to immerse a small silver statuette
20:13in a gold cyanide solution and electroplate it.
20:23The implications for museum directors are chilling.
20:27Treasures they always assumed to be solid gold
20:31may merely have been gilded.
20:34And indeed, in a matter of minutes,
20:37the bottom half of this silver statuette
20:40acquires the sheen of gold.
20:45This experiment shows that it is possible to do it
20:49and that also in ancient times
20:52it might have been possible
20:55to have these batteries used
20:58for such gold-plating processes.
21:01To read an electric battery,
21:04one can only register astonishment
21:07because it's 2,000 years ahead of its time.
21:10So it's possible we have completely
21:13misinterpreted its function.
21:16It may be something quite different,
21:19like a container for scrolls.
21:22But from almost the same era,
21:25there's a device about which there's now no dispute.
21:30Professor Derek de Sawyer Price of Yale University.
21:34It was in Athens, among a group of statues brought up in 1900
21:38from a ship wrecked around the time of the birth of Christ,
21:42that Price made his discovery.
21:47The ship sank off the island of Antikythera near Crete.
21:51Amongst the haul from the shipwreck
21:54were some fragments of corroded bronze.
21:59They fascinated the professor when he came across them,
22:02but he needed the help of the Greek Atomic Energy Commission
22:06to examine them.
22:08There was a good colleague, Dr Karakalos,
22:11who had been experimenting with gamma rays.
22:14He was able to take a gamma radiograph
22:17of the main fragment in the museum
22:20and as soon as I saw it, the effect was dramatic.
22:24You could see that inside the fragment,
22:27where it wasn't visible to the naked eye,
22:30were all little gear wheels.
22:32You could see the teeth plainly and you could even count teeth.
22:37This had such a big effect that there was hidden evidence
22:41that Dr Karakalos was able to get permission
22:44and using much better x-ray equipment
22:48could make x-ray photographs
22:51of all the gear wheels in the interior of the machine.
22:55These photographs were so good that each gear could be located
22:59and even if we only had part of a gear,
23:02we could actually count the teeth.
23:07You see, there is a wheel complete with all the gear teeth,
23:12absolutely countable.
23:14From the x-rays, Professor Price reconstructed the machine,
23:18now known as the Antikythera Mechanism.
23:20It was a wooden box with bronze plates.
23:23A handle moves interconnected dials at the front and back.
23:27The innards of the mechanism are a complex mesh of cog wheels and gears
23:31until now concealed in the heart of the fragments.
23:37That wheel is the one you see here.
23:41More gearing at the back and you turn the handle
23:45and everything goes round,
23:48all geared together in quite sophisticated clockwork.
23:52It was designed, he believes, as a computer
23:55to show the varying cycles of the moon, sun and planets.
23:58A device that by all previous knowledge
24:01simply ought not to have existed for another 2,000 years.
24:04Its maker had perfected a system of differential gearing.
24:08When Professor Price discovered this,
24:10he had found a unique demonstration of the lost wisdom of the ancients.
24:14It is just incredible that the Greeks could invent
24:18this principle of the differential gear.
24:21It is so complicated that it contains in essence
24:25all of the line that led right through to modern clockwork,
24:29to the computer and indeed to the machine age
24:33and everything that distinguishes our civilization
24:36from everything that went before.
24:38And the whole line began right here with this one unique relic.
24:45The Antikythera computer and the Baghdad battery,
24:49if indeed it is a battery,
24:51represent two of the great ifs of history
24:54because they are 2,000 years ahead of their time.
24:58If the societies that produced them
25:01had continued to develop their technologies,
25:03by now it would be 4,000 A.D.
25:07By this time we would not merely have sent a few men to the moon.
25:12We would have colonized all the stars visible to the naked eye.
25:19The Antikythera computer and the Baghdad battery
25:23represent two of the great ifs of history
25:27because they are 2,000 years ahead of their time.
25:31If the societies that produced them
25:35had continued to develop their technologies,
25:39by now it would be 4,000 A.D.
25:43By this time we would have colonized all the stars visible to the naked eye.
25:48Next week, the search for the world's missing ape-men.