Inventions of the Ancient Greeks
The common needs of life are to-day the chief concern of the greatest men, and so we find it hard to sympathize with this view of Archimedes. His view, however, was that of other learned men of his time, that the common needs of life are beneath the dignity of the scholar, and so we can see why the Greeks made so few great inventions.
Hero, who lived a century later than Archimedes, invented a steam-engine, which, however, was only a toy. A water-clock, in which the first cog-wheels were used, was invented by another Greek named Ktesibus, who also invented the force-pump. The suction-pump was known in the time of Aristotle, who lived about a century before the time of Archimedes, but the inventor is unknown.
Concerning electricity, the Greeks knew very little. They knew that amber when rubbed will attract light objects, such as dust or chaff. Amber was called by the Greeks "electron," because it reflected the brightness of the sunlight, and their name for the sun was "Elector." From the Greek name for amber we get our word "electricity."
The Greeks possessed scarcely more knowledge of magnets than of electricity. In fact, their ideas of magnets cannot be called knowledge, for they consisted chiefly of legends.
They told of the shepherd Magnes, who, while watching his flock on Mount Ida, suddenly found the iron ferrule of his staff and the nails of his shoes adhering to a stone; that, later, this stone was called, after him, the "Magnes stone," or "Magnet."
They told impossible stories of iron statues being suspended in the air by means of magnets, and of ships sailing near the magnetic mountains when every nail and piece of iron in the ship would fly to the mountain, leaving the ship a wreck upon the waves.
Chapter II
THE AGE OF GALILEO