Is the jet plane 1000 years old?

Press, 12 October 1982, Page 17

Is the jet plane 1000 years old?

By

ROBERT JACKSON

Features International

In the vaults of the State Bank in Bogota, capital of Colombia, lies a tiny object of solid gold made by South American Indians at least 1000 years ago.

For centuries it was regarded as a religious ornament. Now, however, a team of American aeronautical experts has come up with an astonishing theory: it is an uncanny replica of the latest rear-engined vertical take-off jet.

Could it be that someone in remote South America 1000 years ago dreamed up something that twentiethcentury science has only just perfected? No-one yet knows. So the Pa-inch (3.Bcm) golden jetplane has joined the long list of what the experts are calling OOPARTS — out of place artefacts — major developments in chemistry electronics and aeronautics which were apparently dreamed up by civilisations centuries ago. ’

In 1936. for example, archaeologists unearthed a strange object from the ruins of a village near Baghdad. . It was a clay jar, containing a cylinder of sheet copper with an iron rod suspended in its centre. Since

then, similar objects have been found at other sites in Iraq. The original jar and its contents were put on display in the Cairo Museum. On several occasions, people who saw it remarked that it looked just like an electric cell.

But no-one tried to prove it until recently, when a team of German scientists built an exact replica and, as an acid substitute, filled it with grape juice. There was no longer any doubt that it was a primitive battery,- for it produced an electric current of up to two volts in strength. The original battery was probably 2000 years old. So who obtained the knowledge to build it — and for what purpose was it used? No-one can yet answer the first question. But the German experts think they might have the answer to the second. «

In an experiment, they immersed a small silver statue in a gold cyanide solution and passed an elec-

trie current from their model battery through it. Ip just a couple of hours, the process had given the statue a thin layer of gold. The inference is that ancient goldsmiths used electric current to electro-plate their valuables.

Another mysterious object was a strange mechanism found in the wreck of a Greek merchant ship that sank in the Aegean about 80 B.C.

Made of bronze and encased in wood, it split into four fragments when it dried out, and the inner surfaces of these fragments were found to contain small, delicate wheels.

Recently scientists at America’s Yale University took a series of gamma- and X-radiographs of the strange object, and these showed internal details which had not been seen before.

It appeared that the object was a miniature planetarium, using some 30 gears of various sizes and employing a differential -gear system which allowed two shafts to

rotate at different speeds. It was to be 1000 years after that Greek ship went down before differential gears were “invented” by the Western world.

Other scientists have just discovered that strange markings, carved on bone tools found throughout Europe, represent the phases of the Moon—not just as they were when primitive man observed them, but as they would be when the seasons changed.

Those bone tools are 30,000 years old — which has led to a drastic rethink about when man first began to observe the heavens. Then there is the case of the fSaqqara Bird” — a wooden' object about s‘z inches (14cm) long, discovered among the contents of

an Egyptian tomb in 1891 and dated at 200 B.C.

Recently, aero-engineers have carried out a series of tests on it — and reached the conclusion that whoever built it must have had a considerable knowledge of aeronautics.

The object’s wings and fuselage show aerodynamic characi eristics and refinements. It flies too — just like a model glider.

Now experts are asking: if the ancient Egyptians had the knowledge to build a model glider, why did they not progress to build a fullsize flying machine? The answer is that they might have done. For mostof the knowledge of the ancient world was ctnrod in

the famous library of Alexandria, and lost for ever when this was burned down by the Romans in 391 A.D. and its priceless manuscript collection was wiped out.

Scientists now believe that the lost knowledge may have held the answer to another classic puzzle — how huge blocks of stone were moved hundreds of kilometres to build great monuments. Recent scientific investigation has shown that the molecular structure of some stones had been altered, leading to the theory that ancient civilisations may have known how to liquify them by chemical means, turning them into a kind of plastic for ease of transportation and then reconstituting them in moulds at the building site.