OFH Throwback- Episode #34- Did Archimedes Build a Death Ray?

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Hello and welcome to this Our Fake History Throwback episode.

Today, I'm throwing you all the way back to season two, episode 34, did Archimedes Build a Death Ray?

This one was really fun to revisit.

Sometimes when I go back and listen to the older episodes, especially from the first couple of seasons, I often cringe a little bit.

I was still kind of figuring out the podcast, especially in that first season, and there's so many things that I hear in it that I certainly wouldn't do now.

But this one made me feel really good because when I listened back to it, I was like, oh yeah, this is when the show was really clicking.

By season two, I think I more or less had it figured out.

I think episode 34 still stands as one of the stronger one-offs I've ever created.

Now, it doesn't hurt that there's a very cool story at the heart of this episode.

Archimedes is a fascinating character, and there's nothing more fun than evaluating the reality of ancient super weapons.

Now, I'm throwing you back to this episode now because it acts as a perfect bridge between our last topic and our next topic.

As we talked about in the last episode, Edgar Allan Poe was deeply interested in science and, as such, was a lifelong admirer of Archimedes.

In fact, before Edgar Allan Poe died, the last significant work that he created was a lecture entitled Eureka.

This was an obvious reference to the famous story of Archimedes having a breakthrough in the bathtub and then running naked through the streets screaming, Eureka.

And of course, that's one of the stories we get into today on this throwback episode.

So, what does it have to do with the next topic?

Well, this episode is all about Archimedes' amazing super weapons, like the claw of Archimedes, his adjustable catapults, his highly accurate scorpions, and of course, the fabled death ray.

In our next series, we are going to be dealing with another ancient super weapon, something called Greek fire.

That's all I'm going to say about it for right now.

I'm sure there's some of you that may have already guessed what our next topic is going to be.

But in the meantime, please enjoy this super fun episode from season two, episode number 36.

Did Archimedes Build a Death Ray?

I'll see you next week.

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In the year 75 BCE, a Roman aristocrat named Marcus Tullius Cicero had just been elected to one of his first posts in the government of the Republic.

He was 31 at the time, which made him young for an office holder, but Cicero was nothing if not ambitious.

He didn't know it yet, but Marcus had embarked on a political career that would make him one of the most famous Romans of his generation, which is saying something because his generation had no shortage of famous Romans.

He would eventually serve in the Senate with historical giants like Cato, Mark Antony, Crassus, Pompey, and Julius Caesar himself.

But at the moment, Cicero was but a lowly quaster for the important but rather unexciting province of Sicily.

Being a quaster meant that it was Cicero's job to manage the money coming in from his particular end of the province.

In other words, he was a glorified accountant for a region that was almost completely agricultural and was mostly valued for its grain supply.

Just like his province, his job was important, but unexciting.

To spice up his daily routine, Cicero had taken to exploring his province and, in particular, the capital city of Syracuse.

He would invite local dignitaries to walk with him and his band of slaves as they hunted for lost treasures and local landmarks.

His favorite treasure to hunt for was the forgotten grave of Syracuse's most famous citizen, the ancient supergenius, Archimedes.

By the time of Cicero, Archimedes had been dead for well over 130 years, and in that time his memory had faded considerably from the Roman mind.

Now, during his lifetime, Archimedes' name had carried the same weight as the name Einstein carries for us.

In other words, it was synonymous with genius.

But a century after his death, Archimedes only seemed to be remembered by bookish types like Cicero.

Being into Archimedes in 75 BCE was like being into Alan Turing before the Benedict Cumberbatch movie came out.

In a way, it seems that Archimedes knew that only nerds would honor his memory after he was gone.

So he had a monument created over his tomb that only a true nerd would appreciate.

And sure enough, while scouring the city in 75 BCE, Cicero found it.

He writes that he quote: found it enclosed all around and covered with brambles and thickets.

I had heard that upon his tomb a sphere, along with a cylinder, had been put on top of his grave.

Accordingly, after taking a good look all around, I noticed a small column arising a little above the bushes, on which there was a figure of a sphere and a cylinder.

Slaves were sent in with sickles, and when a passage to the place was opened, we approached the pedestal in front of us.

The tomb had clearly been forgotten by the citizens of Syracuse, but the unusual decoration of the sphere and the cylinder burned like a beacon for curious math geeks to discover.

You see, Archimedes had requested that his tomb be decorated with a diagram illustrating his favorite discovery in the field of geometry.

Archimedes has been credited as the first mathematician to prove that the surface area of a sphere was exactly two-thirds that of a cylinder that circumscribed it.

Now, to those of us that aren't mathematically inclined, that doesn't seem all that impressive.

But to Archimedes, this particular mathematical proof was the most beautiful illustration of the perfection of geometry.

He saw it as his life's greatest achievement.

To Archimedes, a bust of a god or a carving of his own face were nothing compared to the mathematical perfection of a cylinder enclosing a sphere.

Cicero seems to have appreciated the fact that Archimedes' grave seemed to scream, Hey kids, math is cool.

And as a result, he dutifully had the tomb restored so it could be admired by the Syracusans.

You see, even though Archimedes' grave had been left to the elements, the legend of Archimedes had not entirely faded from the minds of his fellow citizens.

Archimedes' mathematical achievements may only have been celebrated by the bookish few, but his military legacy was still widely gossiped about.

Hadn't the great Archimedes single-handedly defended their city from the conquering Romans?

Hadn't the great genius built deadly machines that could sink ships and confound the would-be invaders?

Wasn't it true that Archimedes had even built a death ray that could harness the power of the sun?

Sure enough, it has been the legend of Archimedes' super weapons that has been one of the most enduring parts of his legacy.

For centuries, scientific minds have fixated on the stories of Archimedes' engineering feats.

Could he have really created a claw that lifts boats out of the water and high into the air?

And what should we make of this proposed death ray?

Would it have been possible for Archimedes to devise an invention that could set a ship on fire from hundreds of meters away?

Indeed, his fame as a military engineer still seems to eclipse his importance as a mathematician.

But how many of those engineering feats should we really believe?

After all, Archimedes just wanted to be remembered as the guy who put the sphere in the cylinder.

Eureka, I think I've got it.

This is our fake history.

One, two, three, five

Episode number 34.

Did Archimedes build a death ray?

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the show where we look at historical myths and try and figure out what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

This week, we are heading back to the ancient Mediterranean to explore the legends that pepper the life of Archimedes, the Greco-Roman world's greatest mathematician.

Now, if there was a scientist's and inventor's hall of fame, Archimedes might just be the first guy that would get inducted.

His name easily stands beside greats like Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and Isaac Newton.

But in many ways, he transcends all of those figures because his discoveries basically laid the groundwork upon which all of them built.

Archimedes was both the first guy in the Western world to articulate the most basic principles of mathematics while also being the first math virtuoso.

Now, I'm not really a math guy, but I am a rock and roll fan.

And to me, Archimedes is kind of like the Robert Johnson of math.

Okay, let me explain.

For those of you that don't know, Robert Johnson was the legendary Mississippi blues man whose music would go on to influence generations of rock and roll guitarists.

His music can seem raw and straightforward, but this portrays an impressive complexity in his guitar playing.

His licks were copped, reworked, and rewritten by everyone.

Without Robert Johnson, there's no Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley or Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page or Keith Richards or Hendrix.

Archimedes, like Robert Johnson, was the wellspring.

Both men went through periods where their work was forgotten, then revived, then exalted, and then forgotten all over again.

The other thing both of these men share is that their life stories are basically just a collection of hard-to-verify myths.

You see, in both cases, the work that these men produced would prove to be far more enduring than their biographies.

You see, despite the fact that very few things can be said for certain about Archimedes' life, we actually know quite a lot about his life's work.

No fewer than nine books authored by Archimedes have come down to us from antiquity.

These books are all treatises on various aspects of geometry, mechanics, engineering, and other fields of mathematics, and to call them brilliant would be an understatement.

He's doing calculus before there was calculus.

The guy also invented the idea of pi.

Now, to be fair, ancient Babylonians and Egyptians had had approximated pi to get the area of circles earlier in history.

But as far as we know, Archimedes was the first guy to sit down and actually calculate it.

And to make it even trickier, he managed to do it without the concept of the number zero or decimal points.

So he's basically the first guy to climb Math Everest, and he did it without oxygen tanks.

His writings seem to have been widely read by his contemporaries, but as time went on, they became more obscure.

When the Western Roman Empire fell, they survived in the Eastern Byzantine Empire until they would eventually be revived with a vengeance during the Italian Renaissance.

By that time, his texts were over 1,000 years old, but for Europeans of that era, they still read like sophisticated math textbooks.

This is because Archimedes wasn't just a great mathematical mind, he was also a great math teacher.

He could make complex geometry seem simple, beautiful, and so obvious that you felt like you came up with it yourself.

The ancient historian Plutarch put it this way when talking about Archimedes' writings.

Quote: It is not possible in all geometry to find more difficult and intricate questions or more simple and lucid explanations.

Some ascribe this to his natural genius, while others think that incredible effort and toil produced these, to all appearances, easy and unlabored results.

No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen, you immediately believe you would have discovered it.

By so smooth and so rapid a path, he leads you to the conclusion required.

End quote.

As many have pointed out, his style gives you a sense of his personality.

He was a creative thinker, but also a very clear thinker.

And And he also seems to have had a bit of a sense of humor.

In the preface to his book, On Spirals, Archimedes talks about how he likes to prank the mathematicians working in Alexandria.

Apparently, he was getting annoyed that other mathematicians that he corresponded with were taking his mathematical proofs and passing them off as their own.

So, Archimedes started sending proofs that were purposefully incorrect.

So, if they copied him, they would be embarrassed in front of their math buddies.

It's a cheeky little move, and one that really makes me love this guy.

What's interesting is that Archimedes' wacky personality is also an important part of the myth that has developed around him.

The few stories we have about Archimedes usually feature him doing something eccentric or crazy in the service of some brilliant discovery.

And if we are to believe some of the stories about Archimedes' discoveries, they weren't just brilliant.

They were heroic.

You see, the chapter of Archimedes' life that was most thoroughly documented by the ancient writers was his role in the siege of Syracuse.

Syracuse was the Sicilian city-state that Archimedes called home, and in 214 BC, it found itself on the wrong side of a war with the rising Roman Republic.

However, what should have been an easy victory for the Romans would turn into a protracted two-year siege, in large part thanks to the the incredible inventions created by Archimedes.

While some of these inventions seem entirely plausible, others give the more skeptical observer a moment of pause.

The most incredible of all these fabled devices has to be Archimedes' death ray, a device that could harness the rays of the sun to incinerate Roman ships while they were at sea.

If this thing actually did exist, it would easily be the most badass of all ancient inventions.

But we have to ask: is it too badass to be true?

But before we can solve the riddle of the death ray, we should take a closer look at Archimedes' life and times.

When it comes to Archimedes, we have precious few facts to work from, and no shortage of legend.

So, let's dig in.

When trying to say anything for certain about Archimedes' life, the best place to start is his own writings.

In the introduction to his mathematical treatise, The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes tells us that his father was an astronomer named Phidias, but that's basically the only piece of biographical information that he provides.

We know that he was born in the city-state of Syracuse sometime around 287 BCE, simply because he was assumed to be 75 years old when he died, but even that is a bit of a guess that was offered by a much later Byzantine writer.

Nevertheless, it is certain that Archimedes lived in Syracuse during one of the most chaotic periods in its history.

You see, when Archimedes was born, the island of Sicily was not the thoroughly Italian place that we think of today.

At the time, Sicily was known as Magna Gracia, or Greater Greece.

In the centuries earlier, it had been colonized by Greeks from all over Attica and the Peloponnese.

Syracuse itself had been founded by the former citizens of the the city-state of Corinth.

By the time of Archimedes, Syracuse was a place that was still linguistically and culturally Greek, so we should really think of Archimedes as less of an Italian and more of a Greek.

Syracuse was also located in one of the ancient world's geopolitical hotspots.

In Archimedes' day, Sicily had the bad luck of being caught between the borders of two rising regional powers.

To her south were the Carthaginians, the mighty North African Empire who had become a dominant naval and commercial force in the Mediterranean.

To her north were the Romans, who were steadily consolidating their hold on the Italian mainland and were earning a reputation for being fearsome soldiers.

Smack in the middle of these two spheres of influence was Magna Gratia and the city of Syracuse.

It would not be long before both the Carthaginians and the Romans found a convenient pretense to invade Archimedes' island.

The ensuing conflict would be the first of three massive struggles known to history as the Punic Wars.

Now, to call these wars pivotal in the history of the ancient Mediterranean would be a bit of an understatement.

The winner would basically define what we think of as Western civilization for the next, well, basically forever.

And Syracuse was right in the middle of the action.

Throughout the first conflict, Syracuse tried to play both sides, allying originally with the Carthaginians, but then switching sides and submitting to the advancing Romans.

The leader of the city, a certain King Hero II, was able to cut Syracuse a pretty good deal with Rome.

Syracuse would pay a small indemnity, help supply the Romans for the rest of the war, and they would get to keep their independence while the rest of the island came under the Roman thumb.

The Syracuse where Archimedes would do his greatest work was a Syracuse that had been saved by the clever dealings of Hero II.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Hero II is a bit of a reoccurring character in the legends about Archimedes.

Now, by far the most well-known story about Archimedes is the iconic Eureka moment.

And sure enough, King Hero is a key part of the narrative.

The story goes like this.

Sometime during the reign of Hero II, the wise king had a beautiful crown commissioned by a local goldsmith.

The king insisted that the crown be made entirely of pure gold, but when he received the final product, he was suspicious.

There was something about the crown that made old Hero think that it had been diluted with silver, but the only way he could know for sure was to melt the crown down, destroying it in the process.

It was quite the conundrum.

So Hero turned to the man he always turned to when he had a scientific problem, the great Archimedes.

Hero gave Archimedes the crown and asked him to determine whether or not it was pure gold without melting it down.

Archimedes puzzled over the idea for hours, and after getting nowhere, he eventually decided to give himself a break.

He walked across town to the local public baths, where he stripped down and got ready for a nice relaxing soak.

But as Archimedes lowered himself into the bath, he noticed that the waters rose and spilled over the side.

In that moment, Archimedes realized the solution to his problem.

So he leapt out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, screaming, Eureka, which is Greek for, I've found it.

The naked Archimedes ran all the way home to his workshop, eager to test his new hypothesis.

Basically, Archimedes had figured out that objects with the same volume should displace the same amount of water no matter what their shape.

You see, silver is less dense than gold, so a piece of silver that weighs the same as a piece of gold would have a larger volume.

Basically, it's less dense, so it takes up more space, so it would displace more water.

So back at the workshop, Archimedes took a piece of pure gold that weighed the same as the crown and dropped it in some water.

He then measured how much water that piece of gold displaced.

If the crown displaced more water than the pure gold, then that meant that it was made from an alloy less dense than pure gold, and therefore the king had been ripped off.

Archimedes dropped the crown in the water, and sure enough, more water was displaced.

The crown was proven to be a fraud, and old Archimedes had done it again.

Now, obviously, this is a great story, and like any good myth, it's about so much more than just the plot.

The story gives us the idea of the Eureka moment, that unexplainable high that comes from the moment when everything clicks.

This is the story that has really colored the way we popularly imagine scientific discovery.

The monotony of the scientific process is broken by a revelation that comes like a bolt of lightning that makes you want to run naked through the streets.

Many of us know the uniquely wonderful experience of getting your best ideas when you're in the shower, but as any scientist can tell you, these moments are actually pretty rare.

Most scientific discoveries come after painstaking trial and error and the diligent collection of data.

In light of that, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Archimedes' Eureka moment might just be a colorful fable.

Now here's why.

First of all, the story doesn't appear anywhere in most accounts of Archimedes' life.

We basically have three main sources on Archimedes, and they are Polybius, Plutarch, and Archimedes himself.

Interestingly enough, none of them ever mention the story.

This is perhaps especially surprising considering that Archimedes wrote an entire book on the mathematics of dropping things on water called On Floating Bodies.

Nowhere in it does he spice things up with the tale of his Eureka moment.

Not even in the introduction where that kind of story wouldn't have been out of place.

What is perhaps even more damning for the Eureka story is that On Floating Bodies doesn't even outline the scientific concept that the story is based around.

This is a book where Archimedes basically invents the study of hydrostatics.

Hydrostatics being the study of how fluids act when they're not in motion.

In it, he outlines his famous Archimedes principle.

Now, it's a common mistake to think that the Eureka story is about the discovery of that all-important law of physics, but actually, it's not.

The Archimedes principle is about measuring the force of buoyancy acting on an object, which sounds similar to what gets discovered in the story, but it's not quite the same thing.

In fact, many scientists dating back to the time of Galileo have found the Eureka story somewhat suspicious.

Galileo pointed out that the difference in displacement between a typical crown from that era and a piece of gold with the same weight would have been so tiny that it would have been pretty much impossible for Archimedes to measure it with the instruments he had at his disposal.

In other words, he may have understood the concept, but there was no way he was testing it with a gold crown.

The story becomes even less reliable when you consider that its first known source is in the introduction to a book on architecture written by a Roman named Vitruvius some 200 years after the event was supposed to have occurred.

So it's unclear if Vitruvius was just repeating a well-loved folktale about Archimedes or if he just invented the story himself.

But what is clear is that the science in the story just doesn't add up.

And if we can say anything for sure about Archimedes, is that he was a stickler for precise science.

So if we can't believe this relatively innocuous story about Archimedes, then how should we deal with some of the more incredible claims about the ancient scientist?

How skeptical should we be about the stories of Archimedes' amazing weapons of war?

To answer that question, we need to dive into the Second Punic War and look at how Syracuse once again found itself caught between Rome and Carthage.

But this time, they didn't back the right horse.

As we've already seen, Archimedes' biography is considerably less clear than his mathematical proofs.

But the historical mists that surround his life seem to part for a brief moment during the so called Siege of Syracuse.

If we believe the ancient authors, it was in this period that Archimedes went from being a beloved local geek to a full on war hero.

Some twenty three years after the end of the First Punic War, the peace between Rome and Carthage had fallen apart, and the two great powers were once again at war.

Now our old friend King Hero II was insistent that Syracuse remain a loyal ally of Rome.

After all, the Romans had honored their treaty with Syracuse and the city-state had remained the last independent kingdom on the island of Sicily.

But only a few years into the war, old Hero died, and his grandson grandson and successor, King Hieronymus, had very different ideas about the strategic future of Syracuse, or at least so did the men who puppeted the fifteen-year-old king.

You see, the Romans did not get off to a very good start at the beginning of the Second Punic War.

The Carthaginian general Hannibal had pulled off one of the most daring military maneuvers in history and had surprised the Romans by crossing the Alps with an army complete with war elephants.

Hannibal then proceeded to deal the Romans a number of devastating defeats at the river Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and most dramatically, at the Battle of Cannae.

At that battle, the smaller Carthaginian force completely wiped out a Roman army that may have numbered 70,000 men.

After that, many of Rome's allies jumped ship, and Syracuse was no exception.

Hieronymus allied the city with the seemingly unstoppable Carthaginians, not banking on the fact that the Romans would prove to be impressive survivors.

Cut to 214 BCE, two years after the Battle of Cannae, the Romans were not only still standing, they were ready to go on the offensive, and they were eager to punish their faithless allies.

A conspiracy of Syracusans would assassinate Hieronymus over his decision to ally with Carthage, but the die was already cast and the Romans were coming for the city.

The general Marcellus was tasked with taking Syracuse, which given its impressive city walls and strong naval defenses was going to be tricky.

However, there was no way he could have predicted the secret weapon that Syracuse had in Archimedes.

Now, our main sources for the siege of Syracuse are the ancient historians Polybius and Plutarch.

Polybius wrote his history within a few decades of the events actually taking place, and we also know that Polybius tried to interview people who were actually present at the events that he documented.

So his version of events is about as trustworthy as you're going to get from an ancient historian.

Accordingly, his stuff is also a lot drier to read.

Now, Plutarch, on the other hand, is a much more entertaining author, but he wrote his version of events over 200 years after they occurred.

His stuff is way more interesting to read, but needs to be treated with greater care.

Nevertheless, he's generally regarded as a diligent historian who most likely added to what was in the original Polybius by consulting other trustworthy texts available to him at the time.

The rule of thumb when using these guys is that when they agree, we should probably believe it.

And when they disagree, we should be suspicious, especially when just Plutarch says it.

And when neither of them mention it, we can assume that it didn't happen.

So, to start, we're told by both the authors Polybius and Plutarch that in the years before the war, Hero II had put Archimedes to work building war machines.

Plutarch spices up the story by telling us that Archimedes actually hated engineering as he saw it as a waste of his genius.

He was only interested in pure mathematics.

It's like like asking a jazz musician to play pop music or something.

But Archimedes humored the king and set about creating some rather elaborate machines that would end up confounding Marcellus and keeping Syracuse out of Roman hands, at least in the short term.

So, what kind of stuff are we talking about here?

Well, first, there were the catapults.

You see, we're told that the Romans tried to attack from the sea using massive ancient vessels known as quincarimes.

quincarems.

Now, normally, a catapult is only effective when its target just happens to fall within its range.

As a result, they're great for shooting stationary objects, but kind of useless if you're trying to hit a moving target, like, you know, a boat.

Well, Archimedes apparently solved that problem by making the first ever adjustable catapults.

If your target moves closer to you, no big deal.

All you have to do is is adjust your handy-dandy pulley system, and boom, your weapon is deadly once again.

There were also the scorpions, a type of miniature catapult, which may have been more like a crossbow that was designed for picking off individual crew members using iron bolts.

Apparently, Archimedes had small windows cut into the city walls right at the eye level of the men standing on the ships.

Basically, if a ship managed to dodge the big catapults, the crew would come in range of the scorpions that would shoot all kinds of nastiness directly at their unsuspecting heads.

Some of the ancient sources describe it as though the entire wall was shooting at you.

For the boats that braved all of these obstacles and made it within striking distance of the walls of the city, there was yet another nasty surprise.

The so-called Claw of Archimedes.

Now, this thing sounds absolutely amazing.

This was basically a giant lever rigged with a grappling hook that, thanks to a series of counterweights, could be operated by just a few men.

The claw worked like a massive crane that could be used to hook the Roman quinquaremes by the bow and then haul them out of the water, fling them way up in the air, and then send them crashing back down into the ocean.

Plutarch would call the claw in action, quote, a dreadful thing to behold, end quote.

I think you know what I'm going to call it.

Supremely badass.

I mean, honestly, just imagine that.

A giant claw swinging over the ocean from massive city walls, plucking boats out of the sea and tossing them into the air.

It's incredible.

What's even cooler is that most modern engineers believe that this device actually existed, and some have even even tested it.

And sure enough, the claw of Archimedes probably did exist.

Overall, Plutarch would sum up Archimedes' defenses by explaining that, quote, the Romans, seeing that infinite mischief overwhelmed them from no visible means, began to think that they were fighting with the gods.

End quote.

Now, I'm sure you're asking, what about the death ray?

Well, here's the thing: Polybius and Plutarch both write in detail about the adjustable catapults, the scorpions, and even the claw of Archimedes.

But not once do they mention an amazing device that can harness the rays of the sun and set ships alight in the harbor.

And honestly, it seems like a hell of a thing to leave out, especially considering that these ancient historians never shy away from a cool story.

So, if the death ray isn't in Polybius or Plutarch, then where does this story come from?

Well, to answer that, we're going to have to dig a bit deeper.

So what was the death ray?

Well, that depends who you ask.

It was either a large reflective dish with a concave surface, or it was a series of mirrors arranged in a curved formation.

In either case, this device could have been used to reflect and concentrate the sun's rays to burn Roman ships ships at sea.

The same way a kid would melt a plastic army man with a magnifying glass.

In other words, it sounds really cool.

Those making the case that this thing actually existed point to three ancient authors who seem to mention it.

These are Lucian, Galen, and Anthemius of Trales.

But here's the thing.

Even though that sounds like an impressive list of sources, we need to remember that all of them were writing hundreds of years after the fact.

Lucian and Galen were writing 400 years after the siege, and Anthemius was writing 300 years after that.

We should also take a nice close look at what these sources actually say.

Lucian, who was best known as a satirist and a comedy writer, only had this to say: quote, Archimedes burned the ships of the enemy by means of his science, end quote.

That's it.

That's all he's got to say about it.

Now, Galen's quote is slightly more suggestive, but it still doesn't give us much to go on.

He tells us that, quote, in some such way, I think, Archimedes II is said to have set fire to the enemy's triremes by means of a pyrea, end quote.

Now, unfortunately, the meaning of the ancient Greek word pyrea is unknown today.

So perhaps it could have been a death ray?

Nonetheless, this is hardly evidence of anything.

And Galen basically admits in the quote that it might just be some crazy story that he heard.

It's not until Anthemius of Trales, writing in the 6th century AD, that we have any real description of Archimedes' death ray.

Now, Anthemius' writing is twisty and doesn't make for easy quotations, so I hope you'll allow me to paraphrase.

First, Anthemius states that it's just a well-known fact that Archimedes somehow burnt Roman ships while they were attacking the city of Syracuse.

But then he goes on to speculate about how Archimedes actually did it.

And that's when he comes up with the death ray.

He proposes that Archimedes used at least 24 well-polished hexagonal mirrors arranged in a parabola that were rigged together by a pulley system so that they could be moved in unison.

When a target was identified, the mirrors would be brought into the proper position and the target would be burnt to a crisp.

So Anthemius doesn't really give any hard proof of the death ray.

He just throws it out there that everybody knows that Archimedes had one of these things.

Now when the writings of Anthemius revived during Europe's so-called scientific revolution, the story of the death ray was given a whole new life.

All of a sudden, any European scientist interested in burning glasses and parabolas were writing letters to each other about Archimedes' death ray and were citing Anthemius as their source.

The death ray now had a scientific fan club, and many took their turn trying to put their own spin on Anthemius' hypothesis about the reflective mirrors.

Part of what enthralled them is that the death ray does work in theory, and this is something that has actually been tested rather recently.

In 2005, a group of students from MIT tried to construct their own version of Archimedes' famous device.

Using 20 square mirrors arranged in a parabola and focused on a single point, they were able to make a replica of a Roman ship burst into flames from a distance of 100 yards.

So, in other words, it is scientifically possible that the death ray existed and could have worked.

But even the MIT team had to admit that it was only effective if the conditions were absolutely perfect.

They needed a cloudless sky and a completely motionless target for the device to do its thing.

So, not so practical when trying to defend yourself against a moving ship.

The popular TV show Mythbusters also took on this challenge not once but twice, and both times they declared the myth to be busted.

Not because the device couldn't create a hot enough beam of light, but because it's nearly impossible to concentrate it on a moving ship on the water.

There are also other practical considerations that make the existence of the death ray seem less likely.

First of all, the ancient harbor of Syracuse faces east.

That means that this device would have only really been effective from sunrise till about noon.

After that point, the sun would have been at an impossible angle for it to work.

Second of all, the Roman Quincharimes were staffed with firefighters.

The death ray is basically providing a slow burn on its target.

If you threw some water on the spot that was starting to singe, the death ray would basically be neutralized.

So, in other words, the ray works in theory, but it would have been a pretty lousy weapon in practice.

A couple clouds roll in, and it's done.

Someone throws water on your hotspot, and it's useless.

So, much like the story of Hero's Crown, it's something that sounds like it works, but it doesn't really make sense when you factor in the real world.

For me, the most damning evidence that the death ray is a myth is how late it appears in the sources.

When the first mention of this amazing device is 700 years after the fact, and that should give you pause.

To me, the death ray is nothing more than the speculative thinking of a brilliant Byzantine-era architect, Anthemius.

He heard a cool story about Archimedes and then used his scientific know-how to explain how it might be possible.

If anything, we've been crediting the wrong guy with the invention of the death ray.

It wasn't Archimedes, it was Anthemius's.

But

just because the death ray probably didn't exist doesn't mean that Archimedes didn't create some truly amazing weapons of war.

The fact that our ancient sources are so consistent when talking about the catapults, the scorpions, and the super cool claw of Archimedes should still make us doff our cap to the old genius.

Those machines probably did exist, and they were way more effective than Anthemius' death ray could have ever been.

Archimedes' clever use of levers and pulleys basically made his city impenetrable for two long years.

But the Romans were nothing if not persistent, and eventually Syracuse would fall to the general Marcellus.

The Romans would eventually launch a stealthy night attack on the city, and the defenses would be overrun.

However, we're told by both Polybius and Plutarch that Marcellus had instructed his soldiers to find Archimedes and to take him alive.

Marcellus seems to have appreciated Archimedes' genius and wanted to put him to work making his amazing machines for the Romans.

But poor Archimedes would never get the chance.

The death of Archimedes was messy, confusing, and by all accounts should have never actually happened.

Even the ancient authors seem unwilling to take a hard stance on what actually went down in those final moments.

Both Polybius and Plutarch actually offer us a few different accounts of Archimedes' death.

In one version, Archimedes gathered up his scientific instruments and ran out of his house, looking to fling himself on the mercy of the Roman general Marcellus.

An overzealous Roman soldier, thinking the old man was trying to run off with some looted valuables, simply ran him through with a sword.

He had no idea he had just killed his generation's greatest genius.

Now, that story is just random and anticlimactic enough that it might just be true.

But it's not nearly as good as the other story about Archimedes' last moments.

In that account, we're told that Marcellus sent some soldiers to go find Archimedes and bring the scientist directly to the general.

The soldiers ran through the city and eventually came upon Archimedes' home.

They burst in to find the old mathematician deep in thought, puzzling over some obscure geometric question.

He was completely unaware of the fact that the city had fallen and chaos reigned outside his door.

Instead, he was quietly muttering to himself and sketching circles on the dirt floor of his house with a walking stick.

The soldiers loudly demanded that the old man come with them immediately.

All this did was annoy the scientist, who clearly had bigger things on his mind, and was none too pleased that the soldiers were traipsing all over the diagrams he had drawn on the floor.

We're told that Archimedes didn't even bother to look up, and instead barked back, Don't disturb my circles.

Enraged by the impudence of the old man, one of the soldiers lost his temper and ran Archimedes through, killing him instantly.

Now, there is no way to know which of these accounts is true, but I totally prefer the second story.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Sebastian, that one is clearly the myth.

No one's final moments are quite that poetic.

And you'd be right.

A random stabbing on the street is a far more realistic way to die during the sack of a city.

But I like believing that Archimedes died as he lived.

A dedicated nerd, completely unconcerned with what the outside world thought of him.

A genius that didn't really care if you knew who he was or not.

And in the end, we don't really know who he was.

We don't know if he was married, had children, enjoyed the theater.

We don't really know anything.

But thanks to his writings, we do know that he understood the physical world in ways that many of his contemporaries simply could not.

He designed sophisticated and destructive machines of war that amazed people for hundreds of years after.

And for him, they were nothing more than piddling side projects.

Archimedes may have never built a death ray, but you kind of get the feeling that he could have if he wanted to.

And perhaps that's what makes a legend.

Okay, that's all for this week.

Thanks again for listening.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will dive into yet another historical myth.

Thanks for bearing with the little break that I took over the holidays.

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As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

You can check out Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

And all the other music that you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and just remember: just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, five.

There's nothing better than a one-place life.