The ancient greek genius is said to have invented and built many amzing machines. among them:
a door opening system, that would open the doors to a temple, when a fire was kindled in front of it
-a mechanical bird 9powered by haydraulic pressure) that would sing and flap its wings
-a mechanical diorama theatre, which incorporated moving figures and scenery
a working steam turbine
All of this done by one man, 2000 years ago? My question; why didn’t others pick up on his work, and perhaps develop the steam turbine into a workable engine? Was mechanical genius so rare in the ancient world?
Plus, would an inventor like Heron be considered a dabbler in black magic, and have to watch himself?
Has any trace of the temple (with the automatic doors been found)?
Sadly, a lot of experiments in the ancient world weren’t carried onwards, even by their original authors. I wrote a piece in an optics magazine a couple of years ago about the experiments in optics by Claudius Ptolemy. He very carefully measured the angles of incidence and refraction for light passing from air into water, from air into glass, and from water into glass. His measurements, desopite what some people claim, were within 1 degree of what the modern results would give. But he was seduced by apparent patterns he saw into assuming a parabolic relationship betwee angles of incidence and refraction, rather than the proportion between the sines of the angles.
Ptolermy can be forgiven – there were no tables of sines in his day, except the one that he himself drew up, which wasn’t in a good shape to suggest the law we now call Snell’s Law (or Descartes’, in France). But if he’d pursued the matter just a little further, such as trying to predict the apparent depth of an object a the bottom of a bowl of water, his error would soon be clear, and he might have come closer to the correct law, and we’d have had geometrical optics earlier. But he wasn’t interested, and neither was anyone else for another one and a half millenia. The same can be said for many other items investigated by the ancients.
James White, a SF writer best known for his Sector General novels and short stories, wrote an alternate universe story based on Heron’s engine, titled The Silent Stars Go By, published in 1991. It’s an interesting hypothesis, and not a bad novel.
While this might be true of the general poppulace, it is certainly not true for techno-geeks, as anyone who knows one can attest. The device and its operatioon is all, even if it’s not useful (but especially if it is)
Hero/Hieron, Ptolemy, Thales, Archimedes, and others of that kind were definitely techno-geeks.
I wonder about this too, every time I think about the Antikythera Mechanism - my state of mind alternating between simple disbelief that the artifact is as old as it is reported to be, and astonishment that the industrial/technological revolution didn’t get started a couple of thousand years earlier.
So why wern’t Heron’s inventions mass-produced? then he could have set up factories, casting plants, and (possibly) invebted power lathes (for machining gears and wheels). This inturn, might have lead to all kinds of activities-and a nascent industrial revolution. just think where we would be today. The big question is: geniuses like Heron must have ignited a spark of entrepreneurship in ancient Greece and Rome-why didn’t some wealthy investors fund him? Or was the ancient worldview totally opposed to the introduction of machines?
Coming up with an idea and making it commercially feasible and overcoming social inertia to introduce it are vastly different things. You’re right that the ready availability of manual labor to the folks most interested didn’t fire them with enthusiasm to go after automation. But saying that the upper classes weren’t interested in the mechanical arts because they thought it beneath them has been under suge recently. Not only the Antikythera mechanism, but other geared mechanical devices, engineering “drawings” for archirtecture, and other such stuff have been found. The Romans had odometers. The Greeks had clocks.
I think if someone had pushed for it, there would have been a market for many mass-produced items. (Actually, many items were mass-produced. We’ve found molds for cast metal objects and for terra cotta architectural elements, like antefixes and sewer pipes). Take books. Books were extremely expensive because they were hand-copied. Printing was certainly not beyond Greek or Roman technology, especially if they used Papyrus (thus getting around the need to invent modern paper, as described in loving detail in L. Sprague de Camp’s time-travel novel Lest Darkness Fall). Or even metal foil, for that matter. Books could have been significantly reduced in price, and there was enough of a reading public to support a publishing industry (the presence of public tablets and plentiful grafitti attests to it). But the Greeks and Romans didn’t invent mass publishing, so the opportunity was lost.
RE: lack of technological progress in the ancient world: I once read that the factor that spurred development of mechanical clocks in Europe was the need to know the proper time for prayer. The medieval monasteries had the first mechanical clocks. Now, in ancient Rome, there was no such need for precise time. The mechanical clock led to a host of inventions-so perhaps the monks of old deserve more credit for launching the industrial revolution.
But I’m surprised-the Greeks and Romans had water clocks-were they accurate enough for the timekeeping demanded?
I don’t know why Romans needed accurate clocks, but they had clepsydras (water clocks) that I was told were settable to the different lengths of hours through the year, and had fine adjustments. I believe they had other types of clocks as well, and wouldn’t at all be surprised if they had geared mechanical clocks.
Certainly the Romans saw to it that they had an accurate calendar – the Julian calendar was a reform introduced to keep the year from slipping through the physical year, and I suppose accurate time-keeping on a daily scale can be seen as an extension of that.
Why would monasteries need precise timing for prayers? And why wouldn’t one think that Roman religions wouldn’t want the same precision?
In the Greek and Roman worlds, the biggest commercial activity was merchant shipping around the mediterranean: grain from Egypt, Iron from Asia Minor, copper and tin from Spain, etc. Also after Marius reformed the Roman military around 100 BC there were state factories mass producing armor and weapons for standard issue throughout the empire (before that soldiers bought their own equipment locally). Either of these areas would be your best bet for some new technology to take hold. But again, you’d have to compete with the (almost) free labor of slaves.
There’s one basic reason. In most of the Greek and Roman world, usefulness and the desire for usefulness was seen as lower-class. Only pure, theoretical reasoning was seen as a worthy pursuit by men of the upper classes, who were the only ones with the leisure time to engge in scientific inquiries.
As I mention above, I’ve seen criticism of this viewpoint in recent years. I don’t know anywhere where this concept is explicitly stated, and the existence of much (admittedly undocumented) engineering implies that it’s not true. It’s been suggested thast this view actually describes the mindset of those studying the ancients over the past couple of centuries, who projected their own mindset onto their subjects.
I don’t disagree with anything you said - they certainly had the capacity to build things, and did build many objects. But none of these were designed to aid in industry - what would a farmer need with a clock?
I haven’t done any reading on this topic specifically, I’m only going on what I was taught by my Greek science teacher. If you have some references critiquing this point of view, I’d really like to see them (no, I’m not being at all sarcastic - ancient science is a big interest of mine, although I usually focus on biology rather than engineering).
I’ve been trying – in vain – to recal where I’ve read this. I can’t find anything on a quick search of the Internet. But it agrees with my own experience – the enginweering that went into the Antikithera mechasnism or the more complex items described as coming from Rhodes, or the architecture calculations, or Ptolemy’s work on optics all suggest a vast tradition of scientific and applied work – architecture and Archimedes’ practical war weapons aren’t the result of theorizing, but of hands-on experimentation. I just can’t buy that the Greeks and romans only saw these as toys for the otherwise idle rich, and they weren’t worth doing anything practical with. Or that applied technology was beneath the efforts of gentlemen.
I see your point, but we need to face the reality that they didn’t apply the vast majority of their scientific knowledge, and that the direction of new knowledge was not, in general, useful gadgets, but much more theoretical matters. Given what we know of the extent of their knowledge, we do need to come up with a reason that scientific advancement didn’t happen.
Another aspect which should be discussed, in comparison to the modern period’s scientific atmosphere, is that progress, in and of itself, was not a virtue to the ancient world (insert disclaimer about generalizing anything about ‘the ancient world’ here). We, as a society, believe that things are getting better daily, and expect that many of the world’s current problems will be solved within the next few hundred years. This ethos was absent - they believed the world, in some past time, was as close to perfect as it was going to get, and they constantly looked back for inspiration for improvement. I heard an interesting speech applying this idea to military reforms (ie, most of the military reforms in the ancient world, like Philip II’s of Macedon’s, were a result of looking back to ancestral military tactics), although I’m not certain I buy it.