>> Dr. Wahby: Here is the Keep, and nobody can introduce him better than our Dean of the Library. >> Dean Lanham: Well, in the continuation here of the Symposium on Ancient Greece, we are honored to have with us the Institutional Repository Librarian here at Booth Library, who is in charge of the efforts for The Keep for Eastern Illinois University. Today he is talking with a different hat, and that is that of his background in technology. We are anxiously awaiting some comments and information from Todd Bruns. >> Todd Bruns: Thank you Dr. Lanham, okay thanks everyone for being here. I don't know if we are running on continuous video or not, so hopefully they'll understand this comment, but I don't if I can really follow-up on aphrodisiacs, but hopefully you'll find this presentation interesting anyway. I am going to talk about ancient Greek technology. This is a wide area, so I am going to focus on particular inventions and talk about a couple of different inventors. I am going to kind of set the stage a little bit, again, I am following up on Kathy's presentation, which was fantastic, and so I am going to start out with a prayer. The prayer is this: This is from the Homera Kims; it's a prayer to the god Hephaestus, that's the picture over on the right. Hephaestus was the Greek god of craftsmanship and technology. This was a prayer that craftsmen would say. It is basically talking about how technology had, they felt, the Greeks felt that technology has lifted them up, as they say here, "we used to dwell in caves like wild beasts, now we've learned the crafts from Hephaestus; is making our life good." I also want to start out with sort of setting the stage here, I am going to talk a little bit about how we think about the ancient Greeks, and their technology. When I get in the who's who, we'll discuss two or three of the inventors, and then the individual’s inventions I'll be talking about are listed here. The one at the bottom, analog computer is the one I will focus most on because this is just an amazing invention. If we had not discovered it, people probably would not believe that they actually could have done this type of technology, so it will be very, I hope, interesting to get into discussing that. Through ancient lenses, here on the left we have our ancestor, core magnum man, about 35,000 years ago; on the right we have today's modern man, looking very contemplative. I am bringing this up because when I was taking a course called Global Technology, it was taught by a certain Dr. Wafeek Wahby. That's where I first met Dr. Wahby, and we read a very interesting article by Jared Diamond called "The Great Leap Forward". Jared Diamond talked about how 35,000 years ago, our larynx changed so that we could have complex speech and people started living longer. Those two things made a big difference in terms of all of a sudden we started doing art, we started doing technology, we really did this great leap forward. This is important thinking about the ancient Greeks because I think we tend to think about previous generations, previous societies, were not quite as smart as we are, they didn't quite have the technology we did. Actually, they were... Thirty-five thousand years ago, if this man had the cumulative technology he could have built the 747. They were as smart as we are, what they lacked was the cumulative technology. Basically, you can't build an atomic bomb until you've had gunpowder. These people were smart, and the ancient Greeks were smart. In fact, they had an industrial revolution that for them rivaled our own industrial revolution. This picture is from an arena in Epidaurus, that sat 14,000 spectators and you can see that there's a person standing in the center of the arena. If you drop a coin on that floor, you can hear it all the way in the back row, that's how good their acoustics were. They just...they had fantastic architecture, they really went through this great flowering of technology, and they refer to this as 'techni'. There is going to be an upcoming presentation by Dr. Hawkins, he is going to talk about this in more detail. Techni means in Greek, “craftsmanship”. Technology, they related it to art because in both cases, they are creating something out of nothing. Techni was a very important part of ancient Greek society. So, who's who? There are three ancient Greeks I am going to talk about. Hero of Alexandria; he lived approximately from ten to seventy in the Common Era, a lot of the inventions I am going to talk about came from Hero. He was a professor at the museum in Alexandria which was the Library of Alexandria was part of that. He built some of his inventions were based upon previous work done upon Ctesibius, who lived about 300 years earlier. He was probably the first head of the Museum at Alexandria. We don't know much about Ctesibius, in terms of his personal life, we know a lot about his inventions, The one thing we do know is that he was very poor. Everyone who wrote about him talked about how poor he was. The third person is Archimedes. Archimedes was a renaissance man before the Renaissance. He was a mathematician, an astronomer, and inventor; he was all over the place. He was about the same time period as Ctesibius, he lived in the Greek colony of Syracuse, and he is probably the person who created the analog computer that I am going to talk about later. Starting out with the different inventions... This one is the steam engine. This was by Hero of Alexandria, the first century of the Common Era. In terms of complexity, it is the first use of steam for power, but the interesting thing about it is, it wasn't used to really drive any kind of practical use it was used as a temple wonder. A lot of the inventions that Hero came up with were in the temple where people would come in and see this thing moving and think, "Oh my goodness." Now that was very important to the Greeks, but we sort of look at it and say why didn't you just create a steam engine out of it, but this is what it looks like. In fact, it is so important that even today, in the US Navy, you get badges for being a specialist in certain things. If you are a specialist in boiler technology on the ship, you have a badge that has a semblance of this, which is called the eel pile, so it is very interesting. Another technology invention is the first vending machine came from the ancient Greeks. This was also Hero of Alexandria, and the way that this worked was that this vessel was filled with holy water. You dropped the coin up here, it hit this lever here, the lever went down, the spigot came up, and holy water came out. As the lever drops, the coin falls off, this spigot stops, the holy water stops. In terms of complexity, it's so complex that our own vending machines before we had electricity used this same kind of set-up. That's how advanced they were, and I thought it was interesting that the reason why Hero invented this was because people were taking too much holy water. They had to come up with a way to say you know if you put more coins in, that's fine, you are paying for it. Alarm clocks are another invention. I think we think our modern day, you know, we are rush, rush, we have all kinds of appointments to be at. Well then ancient Greeks did as well they actually had alarm clocks. This one in particular is what is known as Plato's alarm clock. We think this might have been an invention of Ctesibius. What is does is it uses air pressure to move water from one vessel to the next. You start out with your water up here, there's a little hole at the bottom of this vessel that drips at a constant rate, into this vessel. Once the water reaches a certain point, it falls into this third vessel in a rush, filling up, pushing the air out, the air comes out this little hole here, which is a whistle, and that's how your alarm goes off. Once you get up and you take the little plug out of this vessel, all the water drains out into the bottom one, which you use to fill up the top and that's how that alarm clock works. They had other alarm clocks that had to do with water and pebbles, where they would drop pebbles on gongs, this one is called clepsydras, which literally means "water thief". Showers, you know we think showers are a really important part of our daily lives, and they were for the ancient Greeks as well. This is from a vase, and this depicts female athletes that are taking showers after some games. Their showers were so advanced that they wouldn't have been out of place in one of our bathrooms, except for the fact that the spigots were shaped like animal heads and the water came out of the animals' mouth. They used lead pipes to deliver the water; there was a drain in the floor that then, also with lead pipes, took the water away; so again very advanced. This I couldn't find who invented this, there didn't seem to be anybody that was listed. In terms of complexity, it is not unlike our own modern shower system. At Pergamum, which is a Greek city-state in Turkey, they found a whole gymnasium full of these, so these were not uncommon. I mentioned Pergamum in particular, because that is going to come up when I talk about the analog computer. This is an automatic door; this was created by Hero of Alexandria. You would light the fire. You would heat up water that would move this weight, pull this pulley, and the temple doors would open automatically. Now this is interesting in terms of complexity. It utilizes the physical principals of pneumatics, but the question is...we don't really know if this was actually ever produced. We see drawings of it, but there has been no archaeological evidence that they actually did this. Now, the analog computer, the big one. This is probably from Archimedes of Syracuse. In terms of complexity, it rivals our technology today. It is that advanced, and as I get into the story, I think you'll see why. It demonstrates an incredible level of understanding of the universe, and again, I'll explain how that is. I am going to start out telling a story. It was a dark and stormy night, and it literally was a dark and stormy night, two thousand years ago. A very large Roman Galley Trade ship that was taking Greek treasure back to Rome, sank in a storm off the island of Antikythera. Two thousand years later, in 1901, another storm off the island of Antikythera stranded some sponge divers. The sponge divers thought well, as long as we are stopped here, we might as well go down and see what is on the sea floor. They went and did some diving, and they started seeing like statues. They started seeing bronze statues, marble statues, and they found the crashed galley. The galley probably came from Pergamum, because they found coins from that city-state, and roman trade ships were very, very big. They could only fit in certain harbors. This one at Pergamum could take a ship like that, Kos, and Rhodes down below could take a ship like that so, most certainly that is where it was coming from. It was heading back towards Rome and here is where Antikythera is, just right off of the southern part of the Greek peninsula, and that is where they crashed, and that is where they found it. Amongst the pieces was this corroded bronze piece. Now when you look at it, you automatically know this is something different, you can see it is machined metal. You can see that there are places for spokes and gears and there's this wheel, and they could make out that there are some teeth in the wheel. They automatically knew this is something new, but it's all once piece, and it is all corroded together, so what is it and what was it for? They didn't really know, so the first investigation happens in the 1950's with this English physicist Derek Price, and he did radiographs of this piece. What he determined was there are at least twenty-seven different gears in this machine. He also started counting the teeth of the gears to try to figure out what it was for. Now for the Greeks, astronomy is very much like mathematics, and they are doing a lot of counting here. These two numbers stood out... Two of the gear had, one gear had 235 teeth on it, and another one had 127. These are core numbers that are related to the moon. Now the way they relate to the moon is this, the moon goes around the earth in 27, well sorry, yes, the moon goes around the earth in 27 days. Now you can tell that because you see where the moon is in the sky compared to a star. When it comes around the sky, comes back to the same star, 27 days. The moon goes from a new moon to another new moon in 29 days, so when the Greeks are counting on their calendar, they are thinking ok, a moon month is 29 days. Well, as we all know, that does not add up to a calendar year. It is 354 days, versus 365, but it does add up to 19 calendar years. That's what the Greeks called the Metatonic calendar, and that's where the two numbers come from. Because 235 moon months are 19 solar years. The other number, 127 is the number 27 days, times 19 years which is 254 divide that in half and you have 127, then they used the small gear to move that. Dr. Price figured out these two gears are mapping where the moon is in the sky. Okay, so what difference does that make? Well, in our modern day, we see the moon up in the sky and we think, "that's pretty." For the ancient Greeks, it meant everything. It determined whether they went to war, it determined whether they had a festival; it determined something like if you were going to travel at night. You needed to know, is it going to be a new moon or a full moon, because I need that light, so it was really important to them. The only thing was, that he could not figure out what some of the other gears were. There was a very large gear on the back of the machine that he thought has 222, 223 gears, teeth on it. Dr. Tony Freeth, and this is around the 2000, 2001 he led a team to further investigate this piece, to say what else does this thing do? He went through a company in England called Tech X-Ray; they do three-dimensional images, and three-dimensional x-rays of items. They created an eight-ton machine that they had to take to Greece to the Museum because this piece is too fragile to move, deliver it there, and run this piece through their x-ray machine. What I have here is rotating images that they took. Now as you see this in real time, it kind of floats in and out. It is really ghostly, but as you can see as we are going through, they started discovering new gears that were buried in that lump. They started seeing new posts that were there. It really started revealing a lot more of what was in this mechanism, and it just, the level of complexity is amazing. They couldn't figure out, okay, we have all these other gears, they are counting all the teeth, and they are thinking how can we figure out what this is all about. They ended up making a computer model of all the different gears, to try to figure this out. This is a picture of the back of the machine, and look at the complexity here. This is a very large gear, 222 to 223 teeth; this is the front of it. There is the gear with the 127 teeth on it. They also needed, so they could see the interior, they could see all the gears, but they also needed to see, can anybody see any Greek letters here? It's a little hard to read, but they saw this little millimeter type print all over this machine, that's been chiseled into this machine in Greek. They thought, “If we can read this and understand it, that would give us a better idea what is going on here.” They went to Hewlett-Packard, who has a way of looking at paintings, they take a big giant dome, that's got flash bulbs on the inside of it. This is a picture of the outside of it, and what it does is it flashes light from different angles on and off. You start being able to see the paintings that show you where the brush strokes are and how the painting was put together. They thought, why don't we try this with this piece and see if it can reveal the lettering, and this is what came out. The letters just jumped out, and they started being able to read the Greek, and see what the instructions were. What the means were the back gear, the very large gear, they said it said 223. They knew it had 223 teeth, and they starting thinking okay, so what is that all about? A chance discovery led them to realize that Babylonians back you know, for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years had been watching the sky and had been predicting eclipses and they kept all these clay records of when the eclipses would happen. Actually it was real interesting what they would do if they knew an eclipse was coming up. The king would step down for the day of the eclipse, they would put some poor guy up in that, you know, you are temporary king for a day, at the end of the day, they would say okay, all the bad omens from the eclipse they are all on you now, and they would kill him. Then the regular king would resume his throne. In a way, they, yeah, bad omens, the guy is going to die, so it was true. This is called the Saros cycle. Two hundred twenty-three is the Saros cycle. They started realizing that what this machine does. It not only monitors where the moon is going to be at, it actually predicts eclipses. It is a time machine, in a way, because it is predicting when an eclipse is going to come up, decades in the future. It also predicts whether, this is a Greek letter sigma for the moon, Helios for the sun, and this is Aura, which is shorthand for Greek for hour. What this means is it is predicting eclipses, it is predicting whether is it lunar or solar eclipse, it is predicting the hour, and there is even lettering on the machine that indicates what color the lunar eclipse is going to be. In which is telling whether it is black, or whether it is blood red, which is telling you the direction of the lunar eclipse. We start seeing how complex this machine is, predicting eclipses, predicting whether it is solar, lunar, predicting the color of the lunar eclipse, and it gets even more interesting. We know, and the Greeks knew that the moon's orbit is elliptical. It moves faster when it is closer to the sun, moves a little bit slower when it is farther away. Amazingly, this machine accounts for that. This gear has a pin and slot device that allows for variable movements. That accounts for the movement of the orbit. Not only does it do that, and there's a picture of it sitting on top of the large gear, it also accounts for the fact that the elliptical orbit of the moon rotates around the earth every nine years. It accounts for that. Here are all our prime numbers that the Greeks were working with. Nineteen years, the 127, the 223 gears, 53 gears is related to this variable movement, and so they started realizing wow this thing does all these things, so it is really an amazing piece and so they started thinking about well, who built it? They looked at the Greek lettering, and they knew that Greeks in each states had particular names for months. The months that they saw on the device were Corinthian, so they know, okay, this is coming from a Corinthian, Corinth, or a colony of Corinth. They also saw these are words for Greek PanHellenic games. This is Olympia for the Olympics, Isthmian, Isthmian happened in Corinth, and they saw that it is higher than Olympia, it's in bigger letters, that was another clue that this is Corinthian. Why did they have and PanHellenic games on the device? It is because the PanHellenic games happened every four years, no matter what. It didn't matter whether city states rose or fell, it didn't matter if kings died they had the games. That's how you set the device. That was the fixed date that set the device. This writing here in orange is talking about the movement of the planets. The device actually also had, it monitored each of the planets here. You had the earth in the center; these are all the planets moving all around the device, this kind of blurry black ball here was the phases of the moon. It was black on one side, white on the other, so as it moved around, that moved and it told you what phase the moon was in. Okay so, really complex machine, where did it go, why did it disappear for you know thousands of years and we just discovered it? Well, where it went was east, basically. The Greek world collapsed as Italy was rising as the Roman power, and that is what happened at the time it was taken. Roman Gallies, big trade ships were moving through the Greek world, taking Greek treasures back to Rome. Eventually Rome collapsed, and that knowledge tended to move East to the Byzantine Empire first and then eventually to the Arab world. That is where this technology went. This picture is the second oldest gear that has ever been discovered. This is from 500 in the Common Era, and it came from Lebanon. The oldest one is Antikythera device, this one is second oldest. That is a clue that this technology went east. Also, we have found drawings such as this, from the Arab world. Again, this is that gear technology. Now eventually, gear technology came back to Europe via Spain, via the Arabs in the Fourteenth Century in Europe all of a sudden there is this explosion of gear technology, where people started making clocks left and right. It did eventually come back to Europe, and just bloomed there. To wrap up, this is a picture of the device. It sat in a wooden box, and it's basically how the Greeks understood their world. It predicted where the moon is going to be, it depicted the phases of the moon, solar and lunar eclipses, the movement of the planets, they was really of a piece of highly understood universe. I wanted to read a quote from Dr. Price, where he says, "It's a bit frightening to know that just before the fall of their great civilization, the ancient Greeks had come so close to our own age, not only in their thought, but also in their scientific technology." I want to leave us with my final thought, with a bit of serendipity. If it hadn't been for two storms, one two thousand years ago, one in 1901, this device wouldn't have been at the bottom of the sea, and it wouldn't have been discovered. If somebody had just created this and said to us, I think the ancient Greeks did this; we probably never would have believed it. It is amazing serendipity that that happened, and we discovered it and it tells us something about what the ancient Greeks were capable of doing. I want to thank you for your time, and I hope you found this informative, and thanks very much. >> Dr. Wahby: Thank you. Any questions? Any questions? I have a question regarding it's one of a kind to be found. They didn't find any replicas or more than one? >> Todd: They haven't found them but there are stories about them. In Syracuse, the romans sacked the city, they sacked Syracuse and General Marcellus gave the order, do not kill Archimedes. We want him he's brilliant, don't kill him. They way the story goes, the Roman soldiers told this old man who, this old man was drawing circles in the sand, and told him, you need to get over here with the other captains. The old man said no, and he ran him through with the sword and that was Archimedes. Marcellus took back two boxes very similar to this to his home and Cicero writes later about visiting General Marcellus’s grandson in his home, and seeing boxes like this. There's, in the literature, there are descriptions of it, but this is the only one we have in evidence. >> Dr. Wahby: If we find something that is not embedded in water to be rusted and so forth, maybe it will be in better shape to understand, so let's hope archeology would do something? >> Todd: Yes... >> Dr. Wahby: Any other questions? I have another question for Todd regarding the heliocentric or geocentric. Does this tell us anything about the beliefs of that? Because I read one article about how ancient Greeks believed in a heliocentric and for some reason this knowledge was lost, and then discovered by Copernicus and others. >> Todd: What they could see to the lunar eclipses, I am sorry, well the lunar eclipses. When they could see the earth's shadow moving across the moon, they could see it was round. They started putting together, okay; we live on a round planet. Then they started realizing the rotation of what was happening with the planets. It's quite likely that they might have thought that it was heliocentric, although if you look at some of their, if you look at this device actually, this does still kind of put earth at the center, and everything is going around it, so they might have been right on the cusp of that. >> Dr. Wahby: Can we attribute this to the fact that sometimes even today, in the 21st century, we'll say that they sun is rising and setting, while we know that that is not the truth, we just for everyday use, we say it is rising, but it is not. >> Todd: Right, yes... >> Dr. Wahby: Could it be that? >> Todd: Yeah, I think absolutely. Yes... >> Dr. Wahby: Any other questions? Otherwise we will give him a round of applause. >> Todd: Thank you.