Highly revered traditional boat building techniques, all around the world, almost universally created leaky, structurally unsound objects which were entirely patched up with caulking to prevent them sinking, since there was no rational understanding of how boats should be designed.
Although people more often complain that we pay no respect for the past, the evidence points to the fact that the opposite is true – i.e. we often tend to respect things and accept them as true specifically because they are old – such as the current version of a religious text such as the bible versus countless other original versions.
As a dedicated futurist, I am always on the lookout for examples of old is bad, and a good one is in J.E. Gordon’s classic structural engineering book, The New Science of Strong Materials. Gordon stripped away sacrosanct notions in the name of science and reason a way that is sadly uncommon today. He pointed out that gothic cathedral structural gymnastics were often an inelegant structural mess when compared to elegantly balanced dome structures such as Hagia Sophia, but he was especially scathing about boat design.
“In spite of all the centuries which he had to learn about it the traditional shipwright seemed to be unable to understand about shear.”
Gordon was originally a naval architect and It turns out that centuries old traditional wooden boat construction was based upon poor engineering instinct. Boats were designed like primitive beams with no account of increased stresses around openings. More importantly there was no concept of shear stresses which would open up gaps between planks causing leaks, in other words there wasn’t even any consideration of beam theory itself which takes into account shear stresses within the web of a beam. Boats were like five-bar gates without the diagonal member and angled iron bracings were first introduced as late as 1830.
Gordon contrasts with fashionable writers such as George Dyson who documented the years he had spent designing traditional Aleut sea kayaks noting their superior evolved design.
Aleutian sea kayaks may be a special case, a niche exception that tests the rule, however, until the early 20th century boats were badly designed.