How Royal Navy forgot how to cure scurvy (opens in new tab)

This loss of knowledge of how to even do basic things is accelerated in tech

Just try to find someone today who knows how to deal with the layers of tech to get something off an optical SCSI WORM drive formatted as Macintosh HFS with invisible resource forks and Type/Creator codes

Nothing about this type of setup was esoteric or unsupported in the 90s, but today finding a technician to support it is like looking someone who can read ancient hieroglyphs.

The ATF was urgently looking for someone to read data off CP/M formatted diskettes some while back. Imagine a huge agency like that desperate for help opening a safe from 30 years ago as a comparison to how hard it is to work with technology after short periods of time.

The story of scurvy is way more complicated that this article would have you believe. Lind partially shot himself in the foot by attempting to a make lemon juice more portable (and easier to store on a ship). He did that by boiling down the lemon juice to form a "rob." But he never tested his rob and had he done that, he would have realized that the boiling of lemon juice destroyed that vitamin C inside (this is in addition to the issue of copper pots, etc). So folks at sea, used the rob, and it didn't work. And then there is how Captain Cook muddle the issue, but because he had a big reputation and that carried way.

The history here is complex and very unsatisfying due to gaps in the historical record, but it' darn interesting.