Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients Read online

  All ancient Chinese texts, especially those of Lao Tzu and Confucius, as well as the I Ching, speak of the ancients and the glory of their civilization. They were presumably speaking about the people living at least at the time of the “Five Monarchs” and probably before. The legendary Chi-Kung people of this early period were said to have “flying carriages.”

  As noted above, just before he died in 212 BC, Emperor Chin Shih Huang Ti ordered that all the books and literature relating to ancient China be destroyed. Vast amounts of ancient texts—virtually everything pertaining to history, astronomy, philosophy, and science—were seized and burnt. Whole libraries, including the royal library, were destroyed. Some of the works of Confucius and Mencius were included in this destruction of knowledge.

  Fortunately, some books survived, as people hid them, and many works were hidden in Taoist temples where they are even now religiously kept and preserved. They are on no account shown to anyone, but kept hidden away as they have been for thousands of years. The persecution and closing of religious temples by the Communists indicated that the lamas still had cause to keep their ancient books hidden.

  Doubtless, there was a great deal of lost history relating to the early days of China and its technology. What caused the emperor Chin to want to destroy any record of the past just prior to his death? Was he such a megalomaniac that he wanted history to start with him, or was he influenced by the same evil forces that inspired Genghis Khan and Hitler to the same sort of book burning?

  We have heard that in the remote past

  kings had titles but no posthumous appelations.

  In recent times kings not only had titles

  but after their death were awarded names

  based on their conduct.

  That means sons passed judgment

  on their fathers, subjects on their sovereign.

  This cannot be allowed.

  Posthumous titles are herewith abolished.

  We are the First Emperor, and our successors

  shall be known as the Second Emperor,

  the Third Emperor, and so on,

  for endless generations.

  -Chin Shih Huang Ti edict, 212 BC

  Despite their sometimes despotic rulers, invention and inovation thrived in ancient China and Central Asia. It was really the Chinese who invented movable type; the inventor was a fellow named Bi Sheng who introduced the technology in 1045 AD, four hundred years before Gutenberg first printed the Bible. The Chinese are also credited with inventing writing paper, wrapping paper, paper napkins, playing cards and paper money! Toilet paper was another one of the spin-offs of their paper industry, over 2,000 years ago. Probably, all of these inventions had existed in their past, and more.

  The Chinese were well aware of earthquakes and geological changes; they developed earthquake-resistant houses as long as seven thousand years ago. The world’s first-known seismograph for detecting and recording far away earthquakes was invented by Zhang Heng in 132 AD This ingenious device stood about eight feet tall and featured eight bronze dragons holding balls between their jaws. When tilted by a distant earthquake, an internal pendulum opened the jaw of the dragon facing the source of the tremor and the ball dropped into the mouth of a bronze frog waiting below each dragon.

  The first mechanical clock is attributed to two Chinese inventors around 725 AD, and gunpowder was known in China at least as early as the ninth century, if not much earlier. Used there only for fireworks and enjoyment, after it was first brought to Europe in the thirteenth century, it fueled the first cannons, which were made by the Dutch and Germans.

  The Chinese have always had great scope and vision regarding their projects; not only was the Great Wall a colossal endeavor, but the Grand Canal of China, which connects the Yellow River with the Yangtze, is twenty times longer than the Panama Canal—yet the Chinese constructed it without modern equipment starting over 1,300 years ago! There are other mammoth projects that still are largely unknown or waiting to be discovered, such as the largest pyramid in the world, near Xian. Even the Chinese version of the typewriter, called the Hoang typewriter, has 5,700 characters on a keyboard two feet wide and seventeen inches high!

  In The Geniusof China:3,000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention,99 the author Robert Temple (distilling the book from Joseph Needham’s works at Cambridge University) says that the Chinese knew and used poison gas and tear gas in the 4th century BC, 2300 years before the West got around to it! The Chinese were making cast iron in the 4th century BC (1700 years before the West), and they manufactured steel from cast iron in the 2nd century BC (2000 years before the West). The first suspension bridge was built in China in the 1st century (at least 1800 years before the West), and the Chinese invented matches in 577, a thousand years before the West.

  Says Needham in the introduction of the book about the advanced level of civilization in China: “First, why should they have been so far in advance of other civilizations; and second, why aren’t they now centuries ahead of the rest of the world?” Perhaps China inherited its knowledge from an older civilization. Its discoveries, like ours, are just the re-discovery of ancient technology from the roller-coaster ride of history.

  Says author Andrew Tomas in his book We Are Not the First, “Cybernetics is an old science. In China it was known as the art of Khwai-shuh, by means of which a statue was brought to life to serve its maker. The description of a mechanical man is contained in the story of Emperor Ta-chouan. The empress found the robot so irresistible that the jealous ruler of the Celestial Empire gave orders to the constructor to break it up in spite of all the admiration that he himself had for the walking robot.

  One of the world’s first calculating machines was, of course, the 2,600-year-old Chinese abacus. It is only recently that modern calculators made faster calculations than the simple but efficient abacus.

  This would seem fantastic. One would think that modern engineers had exploited these forces, to the nth degree, but the truth is; that outside the common ram, or turbine, the ancients can teach us a thing or two.

  Jules Verne—In reply to a statement that the exploitation of natural forces had been exhausted

  The Marvelous Chinese Clocks

  The marvelous clocks of Ancient China are a good example of how complicated ancient machinery could be. Although mechanical clocks have been around for thousands of years, the problem of accuracy over extended periods of weeks and months was difficult to solve. The Chinese solved this problem with a device called an escapement. This mechanism makes it possible to closely regulate the speed of a clock and to drive it with a comparatively small power source.

  The first known clock with an escapement was built about 724 AD by Lyang Lingdzan, though it seems that the technology was known before then. This apparatus included a celestial sphere that turned with the heavens, a model sun and moon that went around the sphere as the real ones seem to do about the earth, and jacks that struck bells and beat drums to mark the passage of time.

  The bell of Lyang’s clock marked the Chinese “hour” or shi which is twice the length of one of ours. The drum sounded a shorter period, the ko. This is 1/100 of a solar day, or 14 minutes and 24 seconds on our time scale. Like more westerly peoples, the Chinese originally divided day and night into intervals, which stretched and shrank with the seasons. Later, about 1100 AD, the Chinese adopted a system of equal, permanent periods that stayed the same regardless of the wanderings of dawn and sunset. This change made clock-making easier.

  In Lyang’s clock, “Water, flowing [into scoops] turned a wheel automatically, rotating it one complete revolution in one day and night.” The machinery of the clock included “wheels and shafts, hooks, pins and interlocking rods, mopping devices and locks checking mutually.”27

  The words “pins and interlocking rods” describe the escapement, which was needed to make the wheel revolve so slowly. The escapement was presumably a simple system of tripping lugs that held the water wheel against rotation until one scoop ha
d been filled and then allowed it to move only far enough to bring the next scoop into the filling position. Lyang’s clock kept better time than anything seen before, although it would no doubt have seemed impossibly inaccurate by our standards.

  After Lyang’s time, corrosion of the parts of bronze and iron put the clock out of action, and it was retired to a museum. Later mechanicians built grander clocks. In 976 AD, Jang Sz-hsun built a clock that occupied a pagodalike tower over 30 feet high. This had nineteen jacks, which not only rang bells and beat drums but also popped out of little doors holding signs to show the time. Other parts showed the movements of the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the planets. To keep his clock from being stopped by the freezing of the water in winter, Jang rebuilt it to use mercury instead of water as the working fluid.

  According to L. Sprague de Camp in his book The Ancient Engineers,27 the grandest of these imperial water clocks was built by Su Sung in 1090. Su Sung’s memorial to the emperor Shen Dzung describes his clock, with diagrams, so that if anybody wished to do so he could reconstruct the clock with fair accuracy today.

  At this time the Sung dynasty ruled most of China, though a nomad tribe, the Kitans, had conquered some of the northern provinces. Su Sung had a long career in the imperial bureaucracy. His eventual list of titles included: Official of the Second Titular Rank, President of the Ministry of Personnel, Imperial Tutor to the Crown Prince, Grand Protector of the Army, and Kai-gwo Marquis of Wu-gung.

  When Su was sent on a mission to the Kitan court to congratulate the khan on having passed the winter solstice, he found that he had arrived a day too early. The Sung astronomers had erred by a quarter-hour in calculating the exact time of the solstice. Su saved his sovereign’s face, and probaly his own, by lecturing on the difficulty of exactly calculating such events.

  But, when Su returned to the Sung capital of Kaifeng, he urged the Emperor to let him build a clock accurate enough to avoid such contre temps. Receiving approval, Su, like any competent engineer, built a couple of wooden pilot models, one small and one full-sized, to get the bugs out of the design before tackling the final clock.

  The finished machine occupied a tower at least 35 feet high, counting the penthouse on top. Water, flowing through a series of vessels, filled the thirty-six scoops of a water wheel, one after the other. An escapement allowed the wheel to rotate, one scoop-interval at a time. The wheel revolved once in nine hours, while the water fell from the scoops into a basin below the wheel.

  The wheel turned a wooden shaft in iron bearings. This shaft, by means of a crown gear, turned a long vertical shaft that worked all the rest of the machinery, to which it was connected by gearing. The machinery included an armillary sphere (a set of graduated intersecting rings corresponding to the horizon, the ecliptic, and the meridian) in the penthouse on top. There was also a celestial sphere, with pearls for stars in the top story, and five large horizontal wheels bearing jacks.27

  Altogether, Su’s clock must have been an impressive spectacle, what with the continual splashing, the clatter of the escapement, the creak of the shafts in their bearings, and the frequent outbursts of drums, bells, and gongs. One shortcoming of the clock was that it was not so placed that a natural source of water could power it. Hence it had to be “wound up” from time to time. This was accomplished by hand-turned water wheels, which raised the water from the basin, into which it cascaded from the scoops of the main water wheel, to the reservoir above this wheel.

  About 1126 AD a Tatar people, the Jurchens, whose kings reigned under the dynastic name of Gin, conquered the Kitan lands and some Sung provinces as well. After capturing Kaifeng, they carried away, to their own capital of Peking, Su’s clock together with mechanics to run it. The captive horologists built a new tower and succeeded in making the clock run, after they had adjusted its astronomical parts for the change of latitude.

  After a few years, though, the parts wore out, the clock stopped, and lightning wrecked the upper part of the tower. The Gin emperors left the remains of the clock behind when they fled before the Mongols in the 1260; and it disappeared.

  Meanwhile the Sung emperors wanted another imperial clock. But Su Sung was dead, and nobody could be found who knew the subject well enough to build such a complicated mechanism.

  Similar clocks continued to be built under the Mongol or Yuan dynasty. The last Yuan emperor made a hobby of mechanical engineering and took part in the construction of tail-wagging dragons and other automata. But when the Ming overthrew the Yuan in 1368, all the clocks, mechanical dragons, and other machines built for the Mongol emperors were scrapped as “useless extravagances.”27, 99

  The modern clock device, from which such devices as grandfather clocks and pocket watches are derived, is generally traced to the year 1364 when Giovanni di Dondi, of an Italian clock-making family, published a description of a weight-powered, escapement-regulated clock which, except for improvements in detail, is essentially a modern clock. Dondi became famous, and astronomers came from foreign lands to look at his marvelous clock. Galileo later substituted a pendulum for Dondi’s crown-shaped balance wheel, but in watches and small clocks we still use Dondi’s device.

  Some time around 1502, Peter Henlein of Nuremberg invented the spring-driven watch, so called because it was originally used by watchmen. Henlein’s “Nuremberg egg” was slightly larger than a modern alarm clock, had a singe hand, and hung from a chain around the neck.

  Early watches gave their owners much difficulty; as Maximilian I of Bavaria used to say: “if you want troubles, buy a watch.” Watches, and clocks in general have probably been giving mankind trouble for thousands of years.

  The Curious Crystal Skull

  Part of the enigma of ancient technology are oddball objects or devices which are clearly artificial, yet how they could have been made baffles scientists. One such curious object is the famous Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull found in the ruins of the ancient city Lubaantun in what is today Belize. Lubaantun means “place of fallen stones” in the local Mayan dialect, and the actual name of the city remains unknown. Lubaantun was first reported to the British colonial government late in the last century by the inhabitants of the Toledo settlement near Punta Gorda and in 1903 the Governor of the colony commissioned Thomas Gann to investigate it. Gann explored and excavated the main structures around the central plaza and concluded that the site’s population must have been large. His report was published in England in 1904.

  In 1915 R.E. Merwin of Harvard University investigated the site, locating many more structures, recognizing a ball court and drawing the first plan. His excavation of the ball court revealed three carved stone markers, each depicting two men playing the ball game. Curiously these are the only carved stones found at Lubaantun.

  It wasn’t until 1924 that F.A. “Mike” Mitchell-Hedges arrived at Lubaantun to help Thomas Gann with the excavation of the city. In 1927, while digging in a collapsed altar and adjoining wall, Mitchell-Hedges’ adopted daughter, Anna, discovered the life-size crystal skull on her seventeenth birthday. Three months later a matching jawbone was discovered 25 feet from the altar. And thus, one of the world’s strangest ancient objects came to popular attention.

  The age of the skull is unknown. Rock crystal cannot be dated by conventional means. Hewlett-Packard laboratories, which studied the skull, estimated that its completion would have required a minimum of 300 years’ work by a series of extremely gifted artisans. On the hardness scale, rock crystal ranks only slightly below diamonds.

  The mystery of the skull deepened when it was discovered that the jawbone was carved from the same piece of crystal and that when the two pieces were attached, the cranium rocked on the jawbone base, giving the impression that the skull was talking by opening and closing its mouth. In this manner, the skull could have been manipulated as a temple oracle by priests.

  Mike Mitchell-Hedges, Lady Richmond Brown, and Thomas Gann at Lubaantun in 1927.

  Even more incredible properties are ascribed to
the skull. The frontal lobe is said to cloud over sometimes, turning milky white. At other times the skull is said to emit an aura of light, “strong with a faint trace of the color of hay, similar to a ring around the moon.”94

  According to Frank Dorland, a crystalographer for Hewlett-Packard who studied the skull for years, the skull’s eyes would sometimes flicker as if they were alive, and observers have reported strange sounds, odors, and various light effects emanating from the skull. Bizarre photographs have been taken of “pictures” which sometimes form within the skull. An example of such “pictures” forming within the skull are images of flying discs (UFO-flying saucers) and of what appears to be the Caracol observatory at the Toltec-Mayan site of Chichen Itza. In the past few years the skull has become quite famous because it has been displayed at Psychic Fairs in the USA and Canada. The skull now resides with Anna “Sammy” Mitchell-Hedges in Kitchener, Ontario or at her other home in the south of England.

  Mayan relief of a crystal skull.

  F.A. Mitchell-Hedges was a fascinating person, and in some ways, his life was very much a model for an Indiana Jones sort of character. Born in 1882, “Mike” Mitchell-Hedges was destined for a life of adventure. He chronicles many of his adventures in his book Danger My Ally,93 which was published in 1954. Mitchell-Hedges came to Canada and the United States in 1899, met with J.P. Morgan, won a fortune in a card game, and took off for Mexico. He was then captured and held prisoner by Pancho Villa, and later rode with Villa in Northern Mexico.

  He eventually ended up in Central America. With his girlfriend, the wealthy Lady Richmond Brown (who was married at the time), he cruised the Caribbean, exploring the Bay Islands off Honduras, the San Blas Islands off Panama and the area around Jamaica.