The inventions and technology of the ancient Greeks

We present here the ‘Introduction‘ from the corresponding educational booklet created by the vey interesting web-site http://www.anticopedie.fr

Introduction

When ancient Greece is mentioned, people immediately think of its sculptures and temples, and – almost two inseparable words – Greek art. They will then mention the great philosophers and Athenian democracy, probably the Greek theater, and poetry perhaps.

We also know that Greece shone in science. In mathematics, we still have memories of the theorems of Pythagoras or Thales, of Euclid’s geometry, of the “Sieve of Eratosthenes” in arithmetics. And then of course in physics, Archimedes’ principle. In astronomy, thinking of the names of the planets is enough to remind us of Greek culture.

More than a thousand years ahead, the Greeks had discovered that the Earth was round, calculated its diameter and the distance from the Earth to the Moon. But what do we know about the technology of the ancient Greeks, the machines, the appliances, the instruments they used ? Huge surprises are to be expected in this field. Ancient Greece was also swarmed with engineers and inventors, some were as creative as Leonardo da Vinci, except that their achievements actually worked and sometimes still work today.

It seems obvious nowadays that scientific progress is based on technological tools, and conversely, technology is based on the progress of science. Of course, it was already so at that time. The Greeks used screws, nuts, hydraulic cylinders, pumps, machine tools, gears, they had repeating arms, they knew static electricity and even some bases of computer science : the letters of their messages could be coded in two bits, and the Antikythera mechanism, which was discovered in 1901, deserves the name of the first analog computer in history.

You may be surprised to learn that Plato and Aristotle had alarm clocks, that Hero of Alexandria created not only the first steam turbine, but also automata and animated shows, that Philo was served wine by a robot maid, that Archytas was flying a jet dove, that Alexander’s army had repeating arms, that the door of a temple could be equipped with an alarm system, its opening could be automatic, there could be inside an automatic holy water vending machine, some musicians played the organ etc.

And we may begin to dream : what would be the world today if by the fall of the Greek world and of the Roman Empire, all this knowledge and skill had not been forgotten for almost a millennium ? Where would we be at today ? Could the industrial revolution have happened two thousand years before ?

Maybe. Not sure. For the Greeks, science and technology were not intended for mass-production and marketing. Apart from a few exceptions (i.e. when Archimedes built machines to defend the city of Syracuse, besieged by the Romans), scientific research was rarely intended for practical applications, and never for selling them. Nobody would have thought to claim intellectual property rights on his inventions or to produce them in factories. Anyway the notion of factory did not even exist and at the time, a workshop having about forty workers was already a big business. Greeks did not take repetitive
manufacturing in high esteem, and did they really need machines, since slaves and metics were easily available ? Anyway, no one can help beeing amazed when discovering the creativity of Hero of Alexandria, Philo of Byzantium, Ctesibius, Hipparchus, Archimedes and so many others, even if their main purpose was often precisely… to amaze their contemporaries.

(NovoScriptorium: You can find the complete essay here: http://www.anticopedie.fr/dossiers/dossiers-gb/dossiers.html . For more information on Ancient Greek Technology we suggest a visit to the website http://www.kotsanas.com)