Hellenistic, and, subsequently, ancient Roman culture, had a huge impact on our world. We can say that our civilization originates precisely in the heyday of Ancient Greece. The main philosophical teachings about the meaning of life and the role of man in this world came to us precisely from these times. We also adopted the principles of free elections and equality of citizens from the ancient Greeks. Undoubtedly, not all representatives of these states were citizens at that time (most, alas, were powerless slaves), but the very idea of equal opportunities and choice of leadership was very advanced in comparison with many other ideas of state structure.
It is thanks to the fame of the “humanitarians” of that time, represented by a huge number of philosophers, writers and poets, that the majority of modern people have formed a not quite correct stereotype about the inhabitants of antiquity and their level of development in technological matters. Many people still consider catapults or ballistas to be the crown of engineering thought of that time, and from the "non-military" technologies they recall only the huge oil lantern of the Alexandria lighthouse.
Meanwhile, for its era, the level of technical development of the Greek and Roman civilizations was simply prohibitive. The modern "advanced" humanity could confirm the correctness of the thoughts of the ancient engineers or simply repeat some of their achievements not earlier than a couple of hundred years ago! Moreover, there are still skeptics who claim that some real-life things of that period could not have been created by the ancient Greeks, but were later thrown into the excavations of the cultural layers of that time.
The most famous mathematician of ancient Greece was Archimedes. This man was literally obsessed with mathematics. Often he even forgot about food and sleep, delving into the study of any problem. Once, while he was sitting in the bathroom, the thought of displacing bodies by liquids came to him; right from the bathroom, without dressing, he ran to share this idea with his colleagues. Legend claims that a naked mathematician ran through the city and shouted his famous "Eureka!"
Archimedes' inquisitive mind applied mathematics to the most diverse areas of human life: from engineering and astronomy to justice and government. For example, studying the principles of levers and blocks, Archimedes built the first analog of a crane, thereby speeding up the work of the port in Syracuse. And the screw structures invented by him made it possible to build water pipelines and irrigation systems of any complexity and any height. The glory of Archimedes was so great that orders for his machines and inventions came from all over the then Oycumene.
The mechanic Ctesibius from Alexandria left his mark on engineering in the Ancient World. It is to him that we owe the invention of such a mechanism as a watch. The main difficulty in the invention of watches lies in the creation of a constant effect of some kind of force that does not change with time (in the era of Ctesibius, such a force was water flowing out of a special vessel, later replaced by watchmakers with springs). Ctesibius solved this difficult problem empirically; it was only in the 18th century that Daniel Bernoulli was able to solve a similar problem mathematically by determining the shape of a vessel from which water would flow out at a constant rate.
Moreover, Ctesibius invented not only a clock, but also an alarm clock - an automatic device that plays a melody at a set time. He also owns the idea of a pneumatic gun - he made a crossbow using the energy of compressed air.
No less interesting were the inventions and discoveries made by Heron of Alexandria. This man was one thousand seven hundred years ahead of Watt in the creation of a steam engine, made the first vending machine and an automatic door opening system. He also owns the idea of creating a liquid thermometer.
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However, one of his inventions is especially valuable for us, the inhabitants of the information age. Geron was the first to make a programmable device. Almost all designs of his machines contained special drums, on which the program of the device was typed from the pins. Thus, Geron can be considered the first programmer.
But, at the very forefront, at the forefront of science and engineering of that time, there was something that was so ahead of its time that it is difficult to find even one more similar invention. This is the so-called Antikythera mechanism. Scientists still disagree on who was the inventor of this device. According to Cicero's research, it was Archimedes; other sources point to Hipparchus or his contemporary Attalius of Rhodes.
The mechanism is an analog computer that determines the exact time of about four dozen types of various astronomical events. For almost a hundred years, scientists have tried to explain not only the fact of its existence, but also the possibility of doing something similar in Antiquity with the help of the tools and knowledge of that time. However, all the experiments were confirmed and scientists had no choice but to admit that the inhabitants of the Ancient World were ahead of their time by almost one and a half millennia. The first such device was created at the end of the XIV century by Giovanni de Dondi in the city of Padua.
We, modern people, very often have an idea of our distant ancestors as backward and illiterate creatures who thought of nothing but how to simply not die of hunger. It seems to us all the time that we are smarter, better, spiritually richer than them, and so on. This is an unforgivable mistake! The experience of our distant ancestors, their skills, information obtained by them, drop by drop, from year to year, were put into the foundation of our present knowledge. Bernard of Chartres, who, by the way, lived almost a thousand years ago, once spoke very aptly about this. He said that we are dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants; and only because we see beyond them, because they lifted us up. Therefore, you should never forget that there should not be those giants in the form of Archimedes, Heron, Euclid and Ctesibius,then we could never direct our dwarf gaze to the screen of another iPhone …