Metals lost to time11/19/2023 ![]() Sure enough, someone brings up the legendary metal weapons once traded in medieval Damascus, famed for their supposedly irreproducible strength, edge and wave pattern. It's an old story: You're hanging out with your blacksmith, metallurgist and weapon-enthusiast friends and you've run out of things to argue about. But it's also likely that they didn't change their baths' water often enough, and that the night soil (human poop) with which they fertilized their crops might have brought parasites back in via the food supply. One explanation: After "bombing at the forum," the Romans passed around a shared sponge on a stick to clean their "Appian Way" - not the most hygienic option. In fact, Roman latrines and baths retain signs of many of the diseases and parasites that their hygiene methods ought to have washed away. But because the Romans lacked both toilet paper and a theory of bacteria, all was not flush with success. Within them, beneath rows of marble thrones, channels of running water swept waste into the sewers. When not using the loo at home, Romans did their business using large public latrines, in full view of one another. Via aqueducts, underground passages and cisterns, they conveyed water over vast distances, watered fields, fed fountains and, in a sense, flushed their toilets. No question, the Romans were groundbreaking engineers, and they often turned that genius to the art of moving, storing and utilizing water. Joining the Roman Empire, even at the point of a sword, brought with it certain perks. Through their baths and other plumbing advances, the Romans spread hygiene throughout their empire - although, as we'll see in the next section, not as effectively as they might have hoped. Central heating would not re-enter the Western world in earnest until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, driven in part by the advances of the Industrial Revolution but slowed by ventilation issues, fire and explosion risks, arguments between architects and engineers, and the need to convince homeowners to convert from tried-and-true heating methods. After Rome's collapse, Europe mostly returned to its pits and hearths for heat. The Romans' hypocaust involved a brute-force version, which channeled fire-heated steam through passages beneath floors and inside walls, but it worked. ![]() Today, our homes use indirect heat, in which heat energy from a central source flows through the house via air, steam or water. įor most of human history (and prehistory), we were stuck with direct heat from fires, hearths and, later, stoves. But the idea that inventors would begin to re-examine in the 17th century, and that would drive the Industrial Revolution during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was there - regardless of whether anyone in Heron's time grasped why it worked. As far as we know, Heron's device - a water-fed sphere, mounted on its axis above a heat source, that spun thanks to steam escaping from two bent tubes sticking out from its middle -never attained more than amusement status. Whatever your answer, there's no question that the aeolipile, a toy devised in the first century by inventor Heron of Alexandria, was a steam turbine - a device that turns the thermal energy of escaping steam into mechanical energy. These droll scenes raise a thorny question: Do you have to recognize a thing's operational principle to lay claim to discovering it? Should we credit the inventor of a steam-driven toy with the discovery of steam power? In the Tom Stoppard play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," dimwitted Rosencrantz repeatedly stumbles onto notable scientific and technical discoveries, often via toys (neither he nor Guildenstern grasp what he's done). Liszt Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images Although we think we know Greek fire's basic fixings, the method of putting the stuff together remains a mystery - a reminder that, as with chemistry and baking, knowing the recipe is not always enough. Oh, well - that's the problem with taking state secrets to your grave. Some have argued that the true Greek fire, invented by Callinicus of Heliopolis, a Jewish refugee from Syria, was already lost by then, and that the Constantinople formula was a weak imitation. Sources claim the Greek ships launched the fire in pots or spat from tubes, possibly powered by Roman pumps. There, in the year 673, true Greek fire - petroleum-based, self-lighting and impervious to water quenching - was said to have been used to devastating effect by Byzantine emperor Constantine IV's forces against an attacking Arab fleet. But for the real deal, scholars focus on a certain event that took place in seventh-century Constantinople (that's modern Istanbul, in case you don't know the They Might Be Giants song).
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