Evening capital and Maryland gazette. (Annapolis, Md.) 1910-1922, 1918-10-29
SOME LOST SECRETS
OF THE TRADES

There lie, in what has been called
'the storehouse OF oblivion" many
secrets, possessed by men in the youth
of the world, which inventors and
discoveries of the present would give
a good deal to find. These secrets are
now referred to as lost secre.s," as
difficult to rediscover as the secret of
the manufacture of the Stradivarius
violin
Sheffield turns out the finest, hard
est and most perfect steel for cutlery
purposes that the world produces;
but even Sheffield cannot produce a
sword-blade to compare with those
the Saracens made and used hundreds
of years ago, and the Saracens never
possessed the machinery the modern
worker has nor the advantage of
knowing about metals to the extent
that we do. A huge fortune awaits
the man who discovers the secret that
enabled the Saracens to make sword
blades so keen and hard that they
would Gu. in two most of the swords
used today.
Probably not one of every ten thou
sand buildings standing in all parts
of the world and built by modern
masons will be standing 500 years
hence We do not know how to put
together stones and bricks as did the
ancients, and consequently the build
ings we raise nowadays are really
mere temporary structures and will
be in ruins when the ancient build
built thousands of years ago, are in
as good condition as they are now.
The secret is not in the bricks or
the stone, but in the cement and NOR
tar, neither of which essentials we
can make as the ancients made them.
In modern buildings the cement and
mortar are the weakest points; in the
buildings which the Romans and
Greeks raised thousands of years ago,
the cement and mortar are the strong
est points, and hold good while the
very stones they bind together crum-
BILE away with age. We cannot, with
all our science, make such cement,
and therefore we cannot build such
enduring structures as the ancients
used.
Chemistry, one might imagine, is
the science which has. perhaps, made
the greatest strides during the last
five or six decades. Yet chemists of
this day canno. compound dyes such
as were commonly used when the
great nations of today were still UNI
born. Now and again it happens that
searchers after antiquities come
across fragments of fabrics which
were dyed thousands of years ago,
and they are astonished by the Won
derful richness of the colors of the
cloths, which, despite their age, are
brighter and purer than anything we
can produce.
Modern artists buy their colors
ready made and spend large sums of
money on pigments with which to
color their canvases. The pictures of
modern artists will be colorless when
many of the works of the old masters
are as bright as they are today. Just
as the secret of dyeing has been lost,
so has the secret of preserving the
colors of artists paints. Yet the Sc
cret was known to every ancient ar
fist. for they all mixed their own
colors.
How TO make durable ink is another
great secret that we have lost. LOOK
AT any letter five or ten days old, and
one will probably notice that the
writing has faded brown and is very
;ndistinct. In the museums of Europe
NAV be seen manuscripts written CEN
turies ago wherein the ink is as
black and distinct as if it had been
written the day before yesterday.
The secret of glassblowing and tint
ing is not altogether lost. There are
still men who can produce glass work
eoual that that which the ancients
turned out hundreds of years ago. But
the average glass manufacturer can
NOT produce anything that could at
al, compare with some of the COM
moner articles the founders of Venice
made.