I have read that a particular Greek mathematician (Pythagoras perhaps?) happened to also be an engineer who developed seige engines for the citystate he lived in (much like Leonardo Da Vinci I imagine). One of the devices he is rumored to have designed is a system of curved reflective mirrors that could focus sunlight to burn enemy ships entering the port.
The concept of this sounds fascinating. Is there any evidence beyond legend and hearsay? Is it possible to build such a device powerful enough to set a wooden galley aflame?
This has been discussed here several times.
I first doubted the story, but it turns out that there’s quite a lot of reasons to believe that it actually happened. (Maybe not in a war, but at least as a ‘demo’.)
A greek engineer was intrigued by the myth, and decided to try it out. He used polished bronze plates, and managed to set fire to a tar-covered mock ship.
Thats incredible. What an amazing invention! I suppose the more polished the mirrors, and better focusing angles, you could have the ships catch on fire faster (Range would be a really crucial factor as well). The concept of having ships spontaneously burst into flame must have been impressive/terrifying at the time.
Wasn’t there another device, called a Heliopolis? From what I heard it was sort of a rapid-fire Ballista. There were designs written about it, but none survived I believe.
About the mirrors: if each mirror is being controlled by a single person, and their instructions are to aim their little spot of sunlight at a particular distant target, then you’ve created an “intellegent solar furnace.” I had this idea years ago while making science museum exhibits, and later encountered a book called “the solar riots” or something similar. In the book, a bunch of demonstrators started handing out 1ft mirrors to a huge crowd of people, then had them aim all their spots of sunlight at a target. Once the rioters got the basic idea, they went around destroying distant targets (police cars, government buildings, etc.)
The big question: could the Greeks make flat mirrors back then? Did they know about “scraping”, the technique for generating extremely flat surfaces on metal? After all, if your mirror surface is the slightest bit wobbly, it still might work fine for viewing a human face, but when throwing a spot of sunlight, the light would spread out significantly after ten feet, to say nothing of 50 or 100ft.
The advantage isn’t in being able to eliminate a single enemy ship. The advantage is being able to scare the Hades out of the rest of the fleet. I mean, even today, most troops would probably be pretty spooked at having a heat ray used against them. Just think what it must have seemed like 2,200 years ago.
There’s no doubt that Archimedes designed and helped build a variety of war machines for the defense of Syracuse; all that’s disputed is whether the solar heat ray was one of them. He also had cranelike claws to grab and shake apart enemy vessels which got to the seawall, and he made a variety of improvements to the catapults used. In addition, he was the inventor of the block and tackle, which found use in the Syracusian military.
I read a story once about a soccer game in which the spectators had been given program books with shiny mylar covers. A few bad calls later the referee was reduced to a pile of ashes. I think it was one of Arthur C. Clarke’s White Hart stories but can’t remember for sure right now.
If Archimedes had indeed done it successfully, it likely would have been done by others later as well. I tend to beleive this, like his alleged giant ship-grabbing claw, is a fable attached to his name. The block and tackle and Archimedian water screw survived because they were both useful and repeatable.
The repeating ballista was the brainchild Dionysius of Alexandria. The designs survived (you can see them here at the top of the page) but it’s believed that it was too complex to be mass-produced given and remained a novelty.
The heliopolis was, from what I recall, a huge siege tower with many levels of catapaults, archers and ballistae. Saw it on the Hitler Channel on a program about siege weapons.
There was a tv show on this recently here in Australia. It was in a series called “Secrets of the Ancients” (I think). The series looked at how major engineering feats of the past had been achieved and tried to recreate them with the technology of the time.
The episode on the “cranelike claws” showed that the concept sort of worked but only as long as the ship didn’t move once it got to the seawall and nobody did anything to stop a giant hook being thrown at their ship and used to drag them out of the water.
I sort of got the feeling that it might have been a design that never really should have gone further than the concept stage.
BTW if you ever get the chance to have a look at that series do so. Some of the episodes were fascinating.
I haven’t heard of that tactic. But it sounds like the corvus used by the Romans in the First Punic War. The Romans didn’t have much experience in naval battles, so they used a Greek-designed crane to crash into the bows of the enemies ships. Roman marines would then cross the corvus and proceed to a fight on terms more favorable to the Romans.