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Comment by showerst | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that we can't rebuild a certain gel that's used in some older nuclear weapons, because we've lost all of the formulas, all of the production processes, and the handful of people who had both the scientific understanding of the stuff and the clearance.

Has anyone else heard this story, and can they back it up with a real source?

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You're thinking of FOGBANK[1], which they apparently had to reverse-engineer the manufacturing process for after, essentially, losing the any documentation of how to make it.

On the subject of the question in the article itself, it seems trivial to come up with technologies that have stopped being made: semaphore towers, metric clocks, lisp machines, and slide rules spring to mind.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK

Slide rules are still made (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...)

Outside of the lisp machine, it was pretty trivial to find examples of those technologies that are still being made and sold.

I'm sure some nerd out there is making a lisp machine in his garage this very moment. :)

Actually, if you follow the references in the wiki article, you'll find that there was lots of documentation on how to make FOGBANK. The actual components were completely known, as well as the manufacturing process, however the specifics of the manufacturing process (-exactly- which machines) were lost. In fact, what you'll find is that when they finally got around to making FOGBANK (albeit at lower yields) the reason the original FOGBANK manufacturing process had such high yields was because the material they were using were actually more impure than the rerun.

FOGBANK is actually one of those materials that relies on impurities for it's qualities, and the original documentation did not note this (probably because they did not know), and it was only with more recent techniques that we were able to establish that.

Anyhow, the FOGBANK stuff is no where as simple as 'uh durr, silly engineers forgot how to make something'.

It's called fogbank, and the full extent of what happened is unknown due to it's classified nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK

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