Ancient Greek Inventions: Philon's Robot, Archimedes' Claw and More

Ancient Greek Inventions Through Modern Reconstructions

Drawings of Archimedean screws and water-lifting machines, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci

Ancient Greek engineers designed machines that still surprise people today: a wine-pouring mechanical servant, a water-lifting screw still used in modern pumping stations, a self-running puppet theatre, and siege defences said to have lifted and sunk Roman ships. Several of these can now be seen as working reconstructions at the Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology, founded by Greek engineer Kostas Kotsanas, which has branches in Athens, Heraklion, Katakolo and Ancient Olympia and says it has built hundreds of working models from ancient descriptions.

In 2015, Greek reports announced a new exhibition in Ancient Olympia focused on Archimedes, with around two dozen of his inventions alongside devices by other ancient scientists, including the screw, a mechanical planetarium, a surveying instrument called the dioptra, an odometer and war machines. The local mayor at the time, Thymios Kotzias, presented it as a boost for tourism in the town.

Below are five of the best-known inventions, what the ancient sources actually say about each, and how much is certain versus legend.

Philon's mechanical servant

Photo: Augusta Stylianou

Philo of Byzantium, often called Philo Mechanicus, lived roughly between 280 and 220 BC and spent most of his working life in Alexandria. He wrote a large engineering compendium, the Mechanike Syntaxis, which covered levers, catapults, siege craft and pneumatics. His Pneumatics survives mostly through a Latin translation of an Arabic version, and one section deals with automata and mechanical toys.

The reconstruction pictured is listed by the Kotsanas museum as Philon's "automatic servant": a human-shaped figure holding a jug. When a cup is placed in her hand, she pours wine and then water, producing the diluted wine Greeks usually drank. The effect relies on hidden reservoirs, tubes and air pressure, not electricity or gears in the modern sense. It is sometimes called the world's first robot. That label is a stretch, since it follows a fixed sequence rather than sensing or deciding anything, but it is a remarkable early automaton.

Archimedes' screw

Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 to 212 BC) was a mathematician, physicist and engineer, widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of antiquity. The device named after him is a helical blade inside a tube. When the tilted tube is turned, each turn of the spiral carries a pocket of water upward.

An early account by Moschion, written in the third century BC, describes such a screw used to pump bilge water from the Syracusia, an enormous ship built for King Hiero II. The Roman architect Vitruvius later gave detailed building instructions. Who really invented it is disputed, though. Some historians think it was already in use in Egypt, and Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has argued that an inscription of the Assyrian king Sennacherib describes bronze water screws centuries earlier.

Whatever its origin, the screw has never gone out of use. Screw pumps lift wastewater in treatment plants, drain low-lying land, and run in reverse as slow-turning "screw turbines" for small hydropower. Their gentle rotation is easier on fish, which is one reason they have spread in Europe.

Heron's automatic theatre

Heron of Alexandria probably lived in the first century AD; one eclipse mentioned in his writings is often linked to the year 62. His books Pneumatica and Automata describe a steam-driven spinning sphere (the aeolipile), temple doors that opened by themselves, statues that poured drinks and even a coin-operated dispenser of holy water.

His automatic theatre was a miniature stage on which figures performed a play without visible help. Descriptions put the performance at nearly ten minutes. It ran on ropes, knots and simple machines driven by a rotating cylindrical drum, so that each scene was triggered in a set order. Thunder was simulated by metal balls dropped onto a hidden drum. Many writers describe the rope-and-peg system as an ancient form of programming, and the play usually associated with it is the tale of Nauplius and the fate of the Greek hero Ajax after the Trojan War. The reconstruction drawings above show how the mechanism sat behind the miniature stage.

The Claw of Archimedes

Fresco by Giulio Parigi (around 1600)

During the Second Punic War, in 214 BC, a Roman fleet of about 60 quinqueremes under Marcus Claudius Marcellus attacked the seaward walls of Syracuse. Ancient historians, including Livy and Polybius, credit Archimedes with machines that made the assault a disaster for Rome. The most famous was the "claw" or "iron hand", apparently a crane-like beam with a grappling hook that could catch a ship's bow, raise it and drop or overturn it.

No ancient drawing survives, so its exact design is uncertain. In 2005 a team for a Discovery Channel series built a working version in about a week and managed to tip over a model Roman ship. That shows the idea is feasible, not that the original looked the same. The siege still ended badly for the city: Syracuse fell in 212 BC, and Archimedes was killed during the sack.

Archimedes' burning mirrors: myth or method?

Fresco by Giulio Parigi (around 1600)

The story that Archimedes set Roman ships on fire with mirrors is the least certain of the five. It does not appear in his own surviving works or in any contemporary account. The earliest references come centuries later: Lucian in the second century AD wrote that he burned enemy ships, and Anthemius of Tralles, around AD 500, described burning mirrors as his weapon.

Modern tests have given mixed results. In 1973, Greek scientist Ioannis Sakkas had sailors at the Skaramagas naval base near Athens aim about 70 copper-coated mirrors, each roughly 1.5 by 1 metres, at a tar-painted plywood ship about 50 metres away; it caught fire within seconds. In 2005, MIT students ignited a stationary wooden model at around 30 metres, but only after about ten minutes of clear sun. The TV programme MythBusters tried several times and rated the idea "busted", pointing out that flaming arrows would be far easier and that dazzling the crews was a more plausible effect. Most historians therefore treat the heat ray as legend, while accepting that the physics is not impossible.

Why the reconstructions matter

A working model is an interpretation, not a surviving ancient object. Builders combine ancient texts, a few archaeological finds and their own engineering judgement, and different teams can arrive at different designs. Looking at a reconstruction is most rewarding when you ask what evidence it rests on: a detailed manual, as with Heron, a battle account written long afterwards, as with the claw, or a late legend, as with the mirrors.

The bigger lesson is that ancient Greek engineering was practical as well as theoretical. Its builders understood air pressure, levers, gearing and timed sequences, and some of their solutions, like the screw pump, never needed replacing. The most famous surviving proof is the Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator explored in our article The Antikythera Mechanism: Reading the Evidence in Its Gears.

Sources: Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology; Philo of Byzantium; Archimedes' screw; Hero of Alexandria; Claw of Archimedes; Archimedes' heat ray (all Wikipedia); original Greek report via Mixani tou Xronou; image credits Augusta Stylianou and Giulio Parigi.

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