Top Ten Weird Machines From Ancient Greece
The connection between technology and culture in ancient Greece goes back to the earliest surviving writing from the 5th Century B.C. when the pre-Socratic philosophers, Thales and Anaximander, began looking for natural (as opposed to mythological) foundations to explain the universe. Their use of models to speculate and test hypotheses lead to advancements in philosophy and culture that continued into the time of Plato and Aristotle. Feats of civil engineering, the standardization of weights and measures, and the development of public time in ancient Athens, all demonstrate how technology contributed to Greek civilization, and suggest that the Greek way of life may have been surprisingly modern in many aspects.
1 The Lottery Machine
The Greeks are perhaps best known as inventors of the democratic form of government, but in Greece equal representation was less important than impartiality. Elections were conducted using a *kleroterium*, a lottery machine, to select members for a yearly assembly among the tribes and for other official matters including the assembling of juries.
The machine consisted of a stone board slotted in columns and rows, and a hopper that held pebbles or dice. White pebbles represented the number of available offices, while black pebbles represented the difference between the number of available offices and the number of tribes. The pebbles were released one-by-one, and fell into the slots holding the tokens of the participants. A white pebble in your token’s slot indicated selection, while a black one indicated your tribe was left out of the council that year.
2 The Coin-Op Holy Water Dispenser
The use of water and air displacement to power devices was a major theme for inventors throughout Greek antiquity. One of the earliest gadgets, the holy water dispenser, developed as priests found it necessary to automate the distribution of sacramental water to worshippers who were required to wash their hands.
The coin-operated design, from Heron's *Pneumatics*, combined the faucet concept from Egypt, and the lottery-style voting machines already in use in the government of Greek city-states.
The one-at-a-time interface (from the lottery machine) receives a coin through the slot and guides it onto a plate where the weight causes a valve to open, allowing water to flow. As the coin slides off the plate, the valve closes again, ready for the next customer.
3 The Claw of Archimedes
There were two major inventors in ancient Greece, Archimedes of Syracuse and Heron of Alexandria. Archimedes lived about a century earlier, and was more theoretical. He made important contributions to math and physics, and applied his insights to a variety of inventions, most notably the military applications that were used to defend Syracuse.
Archimedes famously boasted, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” He seems to have made good on the promise with the invention of a giant hook which used lever mechanics from the catapult to raise enemy ships out of the water on a giant hook.
Archimedes also invented a heat ray that apparently used plates of bronze to focus rays of light into a beam intense enough to burn enemy ships.
4 Magical Singing Birds
In his famous poem, *Sailing to Byzantium*, William Butler Yeats describes how the “birds in the trees” merged with the youthful spirit of his imagined Greece.
Heron's fountain used the weight of water to rotate an owl that overlooked figures of birds drinking. The flow of water through the fountain caused a bucket of water to recursively tip over, transferring weight, and turning the owl. When the owl looked away, the birds sang as the water pulled air through the tubes. As the bucket filled, the owl turned back to the birds who simultaneously fell silent.
5 The Dramatic Exit
The most lasting contribution of Heron's gadgets may be the special effects used in his mechanical theater, particularly the lightning bolt at the climax of the play *Nauplius*.
According to a legend, Nauplius, king of Nauplia, had sent his son Palamedes to fight with the Achaeans. As the Greeks made their way home after the fall of Troy, Odysseus and Little Ajax conspired to bring false charges against Palamedes, resulting in his death. On hearing the news, Nauplius cursed Ajax, and the goddess Athena enacted revenge, sending a storm to wreck his ship.
After depicting the beginning of Ajax journey home, the play's final scene shows Ajax swimming beside his wrecked ship. As Athena ascends over the stage, a mechanism lowers and raises the lightning bolt at the same time as it changes the backdrop, replacing the image of Ajax with a view of the open ocean.
6 The Wine Cooler
Another more practical invention was the clay wine-cooler or *psykter*, a wine jar with clay tubing running throughout. On warm days, the jar could be placed in a container filled with cool water. Conduits allowed the water to circulate around and through the container, cooling the wine without diluting it.
7 Heron’s Steam Engine
Heron’s experiments with air and water displacement also developed into experiments with steam despite the fact that the idea would not be converted into an engine suitable for practical use until A.D. 1712.
Heron’s steam engine appears in one of his fountain designs in which boiling water released hot air into the figures of a bird, a trumpeter, and a serpent. As the air was released, the bird sang, the trumpeter sounded his horn, and the serpent blew hot air back into the fire that boiled the water.
8 Scientific Models
The reciprocal relationship between philosophy and technology dates all the way back to the beginning of western philosophy.
Thales speculated that “All things are made of water,” and his successor, Anaximander, used mechanistic technology to develop models capable of representing and testing these kinds of theories about the universe, a practices that extended to the advancements of Pythagoras and other ancients, as well as to the modern insights of Galileo and Newton.
Anaximander’s model depicted the earth as a disc surrounded by concentric layers of the cosmos represented by rings of clay tubing. The tubes had holes in them of various sizes to illuminate the sun, moon, and other known objects of the cosmos.
9 The Starting Gate
stagIn the Olympic Games of the classical era of Greek civilization, the desire to purify the contest of human error lead to the invention of a gate apparatus, the *hysplex*, first for foot races, and later for chariots.
There were three versions of the *hysplex*, all of which centered on a main idea. The runners were aligned in lanes facing away from a triangular structure. In the first hysplex, a judges stood in a manhole at the apex of the triangle, holding a rope attached to individual ropes for each lane. In the gate itself, the ropes were linked to restraints of various kinds, some barring the runner at the waist or knee, and others holding each runner at the foot or elbow. Instead of relying on the eye of a judge, the runners were started when the judge pulled the rope, releasing the holds, presumably at the same time.
The first *hysplex*, as Stephen Miller writes in *Ancient Greek Athletics*, was likely a failure, since the ropes were prone to tangling, and the mechanism worked better for lanes in the center than it did for outside lanes. Subsequent versions refined the mechanism, using the same structure, but simplifying the mechanism by linking ropes to a single barrier that functioned for all the lanes. The third version used a mechanism from the catapult to further enhance the action of barriers at the start of the race, actually propelling the runners forward.
10 The Tower of the Winds
Technology was also used in a similar fashion to regulate commerce in Athens. A jury, selected through the *kleroterium*, oversaw the standardization of weights and measures. The implementation of standards was a practice common among the city-states, but with systems that also differed between them.
In Athens, a town clock presided over the marketplace, used water displacement to mark the hours of the day, either using a picture of the sun, or a dial with a hand. The clock functioned by linking the gears to a float which sank as a small well emptied, turning the hand or face in regular time.