Did Archimedes build a death ray?

gonna stick, and now you can't even remember it. Yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about. Which episode was it? I think it was Broken Bones Healing. Oh, that was pretty recent. It just dropped yesterday in real time. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, but here we are in October and it's long since forgotten. It was kind of agonizing to like just talking what was it the Green Tree or Green Stick where little kids bones break? Oh? Yeah, man, we heard from a lot of people on that too. Yeah,

and everybody had a hard time listening to it. Yeah, and we got some pretty gnarly pictures. Yeah, that dude with the staples down his leg and the guy with a crooked wrist like, don't send us this stuff anymore, please stop, so Chuck. Yes, I know you're familiar with the work of economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Sackster, but don't I'm don't ont me bore you too much. I'll try to keep it brief. Of course, you're aware that Sacks once said that humanity can most likely reproduce its

way out of any dire situation. Global warming, climate change, starvation, reaching carrying capacity, running out of water, all of these things we can paradoxically get our get ourselves out of by producing more people, more people who are going to consume more of these things. And the reason, of course that Sacks is saying this is that the more people that are produced, the higher the chances that some of

those people are geniuses. And the more geniuses you have running around the planet at any given time, the more likely those geniuses are to solve the big picture problems that we face. We need more geniuses, So apparently we're all supposed to reproduce more. Um, does he account for all the dummies? Yeah, I guess what he's saying. When

you put the dummies against the geniuses. Even the dummies can't on your mind, the work of enough geniuses, right, so one genius can for the undoing of a thousand dummies. But it's like, then you have the idiocracy problem. It's like, well, we need to make sure that smart people are are reproducing too. Oh, I thought you were gonna say a movie based on one joke. I love that movie. It's a cute movie. I thought it was good. It's right, it's worth in for me. Um it didn't. Yeah, no,

actually it was okay, but it worth in. Okay, I'm not pooping. Um. Did you like off Space? Yeah? Sure, who didn't? I don't know, I don't. I think everybody on the planet loved Office Space. Yeah, that was a big underground hit. Still is like, it's still part of the vernacular for people to say things like flair and uh, there's always one guy in the office that's talking about it tail right. Every office has got someone quoting office space or he's a straight shooter with upper management written

all over. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so um Archimedes. Yeah, speaking of office space, Well, we're talking about genius, isn't you know? It's something to be a genius now, But when you are a genius, you basically expected to immediately sell out to the man or the government, and your ideas are going to be used for nefarious reasons against everybody else. Yeah, that's kind of how it works a lot of times, you know, like that Matt Damon soliloquy and Goodwill Hunting

where he's Yeah, it's probably pretty accurate. Um, there was a time, however, where just being a genius was you could change humanity forever. And you can make an an argument that it was easier to be a genius before because you there was so much to be discovered. I totally agree, But it's still you should take your head off to guys like Archimedes, some of the earliest geniuses, because Archimedes was thank you you just did. Didn't get off my cap. He was somebody worth taking your hat

off to let alone. The one thing that's possibly the biggest thing that he figured out was calculating pie. Yeah, so throw the people who can like calculate pie a hundred and fifty places or whatever, just out the window. Just throw him out in the nearest window, people who are standing next to them right now. Because this guy came up with pie originally. Yeah, he calculated pie um. If you don't know who Archimedes is, by the way, he was a mathematician and a physicist and engineer, inventor

and all around renaissance man pre Renaissance. Well, let's talk about him a little bit. He was born in two eight seven b c. In Syracuse, Orange, which is a modern day Sicily. Yeah. So he was just an Italian or well that back then it was a Greek city state. Yeah, but you know like Sicily, Sicily, Yeah, you know, the old thing Sicily, Sicily. And he was one of the o g Sicilians, a Syracusian. Yeah, and he lived his whole life there and um, later in his life he

would do a lot to try and protect his fair city. Right, So basically he's walking around Syracuse. Is aside from going and being educated in egypt Um, which is where a lot of the early Greek thinkers went to study. Um, he, like you said, lived his life in Syracuse, and he was basically allowed to roam around being the local odd ball because he was so far and he was he played that part pretty well. Yeah. Not only did he

calculate pie first, he um worked. It wasn't quite calculus, because calculus wasn't invented, but they might as well have been calculus. He's proofs he was coming up with about two thousand years before calculus was invented, so he was pre calculus and not that classic in the eighth grade that you hated. Um, I shouldn't knock math. I always knock math. I'm sorry, don't apologize to me. I have

a lot of hatred towards math. I don't want to school the utes of today, though, Go to take pre calculus. You're gonna love it. Yes, that's what I say. Yeah, I don't think you're telling anything they don't already know though, you know, like kids who math appeals to thee I have a deep admiration for those kids and don't progrudge them anything. I think you're born into it. Um. Like, if you're into math and you're a kid right now, you have you're smarter than Chuck and Josh put together. Yeah,

and you've got a big advantage in life too. Yeah, because your checkbook is going to be that's right. Uh. He came up with the principle of hydro statics displacement, calculating like you're the volume of the human body or really anything. But at first it was a human body because he did it by getting in a bathtub and its spilled over. Let's talk about this makes sense? Yeah, and what did he do when he figured out that? He ran around naked? Apparently shouting eureka, which means I've

got it. Let's talk about the story behind us. So there was a king who had a pretty favorable opinion of Archimedes, King Hero the second, I believe, and uh, King Hero came to our comedies. This is a story with a crown that a local goldsmith had made. He had commissioned a local goldsmith to make for him, and the king said, hey, our commedies. I suspect I gave this local goldsmith the gold to make this count, but I suspect that he replaced some of the gold with silver,

and that this isn't a pure gold crown. And I wanted to gold crown. Can you help me? You're smart guy, yeah, can you help me figure that out? And our community is just like, oh man, this is a tough one. And he thought and thought and thought and thought for

a long time. And it was when, like you said, he was in a bath he was lowering himself into the bath that some water spilled over that he came up with what's called Archimedes principle of hydrostatics, which basically says that um the the an object, the volume of an object just places an equal volume of water. Right, So we have things like airships or not water but fluid which can be water or air or gas, liquid

or gas. So we have like airships, a ka Zeppelin's ship, ships, ship ships as yet things that float and don't sink. We can thank our our communities for the math that led to those. But anyway, so he's got this crown right, And it was when he was in the bath that he realized how we could figure out how the crown is pure, whether it was or not. He weighed the crown and then got a bar of gold that he knew was pure that way, the exact same as the crown. He had a cylinder of water or bats of water.

He had a receptacle of water filled to the brim with water, Like we said water he drops the gold into is my natural aversion to understanding math showing I feel like it is. He has this receptacle of water filled to the brim. He takes this bar of pure gold, drops it into the receptacle and it just places water

just placed his place, right. So now he takes the gold out and the volume of water has been reduced, some of it's filled out, right, that's equal to the volume which produced by the density of the gold of the gold. Okay, so now he's got the gold crown. If he drops the gold crown into this receptacle of water and it brings the water up to the exact level that it was before the gold bar was dropped in there, that means that the density of the gold crown and the density of the equal weight gold bar

are the same, meaning that the gold crown is pure. Yeah, and that's the key I don't think you mentioned at the beginning was that the gold bar he had was supposedly the same amount of gold as what was used to make the crown, same way, so it should have

the same exact density. Now, silver has a different density than gold, so the same weight of a bar of gold and a bar of silver have different densities, which means that if the guy had added some silver to this, the amount of water wouldn't come back up to the top. So it happened who knows who cares. Oh wait, you don't have an ending to that story. The ending is that he figured this out and uh he ran naked

to the street shot in Eureka, Eureka. Oh man, Now I have to know was the gold crown gold or was it gold and silver. We're gonna go ahead and say it's gold, because if it were gold and silver, then the king would surely have to slay the goldsmith. And I have the impression that King Hero the second of Syracuse was a fairly benevolent, beneficent, beneficent king. Hold on, before we're go any further, what do you think about a message break? That's great? Alright, so our comedian has

done talking for the rest of the podcast. No, you're not. He Uh so he was a smart guy, that's what that story equals. Yes, he um he was. He was an inventor, but he was more than inventor in my opinion. He was a modifier of inventions. Like he didn't invent the catapult old, but he made the catapult into a variable range weapon instead of a fixed range weapon, much more useful. Yes, he didn't invent um the water screw.

He didn't been in the water screw. I think didn't he Apparently it's an Egyptian really thing that he found an improved Okay, well, good for him, though I'm not saying that like, well they call it our comedes screw. Well yeah, ever, the impression he wouldn't have called it that. I don't think he was much of a self promoter. He was a producer, you think, so, yeah, he just got the work done, alright. So eventually his his tinkering and his obsession, like he would get really fixated on

his work, would lead to his death. Um. Although he was old. He was seventy five, and uh, that's got to be old for that age. Oh sure before the commentary, Yeah, heck yeah, he was really old. Uh. And a Roman soldier. I've seen varying accounts of this story, um, but the gist of it is is that a Roman soldier came in and said, hey, you need to go meet with General Marcellus, because Marcellus we're in charge here now. Marcellus

wants to meet with you. Um. He's got a briefcase, uh and a mysterious band aid on the back of his neck. Um. And so he goes in there and he says, you know, General Marcellus wants to meet with you. And Archimedes was in the middle of uh his math, basically trying to come up with some new proofs, you know, like he's creating a geometric proof or something, right, And he was in the middle of it. Yeah, and he had drawn this on the floor. It was all drawn out,

and um, one account I saw what he said. No, I'm like, I'm too busy. I can't go see him now. And the guy got angry and killed him with a sword. You found that he was beaten to death. Either way, he died, but he had said something along the lines of don't disturb my circles, very dismissively to this Roman soldier, which pissed him off. Yeah, and so the Roman soldier killed him one way or another exactly. And apparently, um,

the Roman soldier didn't realize who he was. Well, No, General of Marcellus was not too happy, no, because he wanted to use him. Yeah, our comedies was very well known around this area. Um. And the whole reason that a Roman soldier was even in our comedies's house in the first place was because they were besieging and had

been besieging Syracuse for two years. Two full years. Well, yeah, they Syracuse was surrounded by a sixteen mile wall, so it was very fortified city, right, So it wasn't the kind of place you could just waltz in and siege, right like this will be an afternoon siege. It was a two year siege. So here's the weird thing. For about fifty years of King Hero the second reign Um, this city state, the Greek city state of Syracuse, allied itself with Rome. Everything was fine, it was a time

of peace. The Romans were, you know, pretty much conquering the world at the forefront of everything, yeah, and taking care of their friends, including Syracuse. But um, King Hero's successor has son Um decided to go and allie Syracuse

with Carthage. The general Hannibal had recently had some pretty good victories and it caught the attention of Hero's successor, and as a result that his successor was assassinated in like thirteen months, and there's a lot of civil strife that kind of came about as a result of this. Syracuse was divided. We should allie with Carthage, we should

a lie with Rome. Well, whatever the case was, there complete alliance to Rome had been shattered, and Rome sent General Marcellus to negotiate at first, I guess, to get them back on their side. And when negotiations failed, he started to attack the city. And when he attacked the city, Archimedes war machines were unleashed upon the Romans. Well. Yeah, they went to Archimedes and they said, you're a smart guy. Can you figure out some it's some innovative ways to

thwart these people? And he said, hey, it's no problem, you know. Uh So one of the things he came up with, and I love his warp machines because it's just kind of cool stuff. It's all like back in that day, it was all very practically oriented with pulleys and levers and things. You know. It wasn't like you know, nuclear fission's like, hey, let me think how I can use these drop these big heavy things onto people the best with the with the people that I have at

my disposal, which is a lot of people. Uh. One My favorite thing was the iron hand or the iron Archimedes claw. Uh. This was basically it's like a large lever with a grappling hook um and that would hang uh uh flush with the walls. So they wouldn't see it, you know. And then when the ships would come into

the harbor, they would swing this thing out. They would lower the boom literally and this grappling hook would attach onto the front of a ship or any part of the ship would be great, and they would have all these people and oxen and things that would immediately yank it up and basically yank these ships either in half or tip them over and capsize them, or drop them in the front end out of the water and then release it and then drop it back in the water

where the boat would break or capsize right exactly, and the the sailors would be shaken off. And these are big ships. Supposedly, Um, they were called quinn Querines. Yeah, that was the ship of the day. Yeah, And those things weighed about a hundred metric tons and um, like four dudes on these things were not small. They weren't small. And there was supposedly this giant iron claw that could pick them up and shake the people off and then

throw the ship back into the seat. And they think that it was probably balanced with the counterweight rather than say like pulice, which some accounts have it as um because the counterweight would be it would balance out the weight of this huge arm and the claw um, meaning that just a few people could move it up and down inside to side when they needed to because the bull because the way it was countered. And again, he didn't invent this, but he modified existing things to make

war machines. Basically. Uh, And we should say it's entirely possible the iron hand or iron claw didn't exist or existed in some less fantastic fashion less um less James West fashion um. But it's possible and probable even that it was. There was something like that that was used during the Siege of Syracuse. Yeah. That's the coolest things to me is that this stuff, this is so long ago that we don't have the great records, so there's a lot of speculation of how he did it. It's

just like how the pyramids built. You know. It's kind of fun to sit around and tease your brain with that stuff or build these things like Discovery Channel did on their show super Weapons of the Ancient World. They built an iron hand. Did it work? Heck yeah, I did nice. I mean it's not it's very basic. It's like, let me lower this big hook onto your ship and use a lot of force to pull it up and then drop it. It's like the claw that you used to like win stuff at the bowling alley out of

those machines. Uh, well, an upside down version of that. Oh, is it like a it's a hook. Yeah, it's a grappling hook. Okay, but the nomenclature of the day that was called a claw, I got you. Yeah, okay, So let's take another a little second for a message break. Okay,

all right, so let's get back to it. So you have the iron claw that was probably for real and used against Rome because it was mentioned several times by um, not necessarily contemporary historians, but Plutarch mentions it in Plutark did a lot of the historical recording of the day for our comedies, but it was about two fifty years after our comedies lived. Um, there was another one that was pretty cool. May not have existed, but it was possible,

and it's called Archimedes death ray. Cool name. It's a great name, the greatest name for a weapon ever, probably our comedies death ray. What about a band name. I'm sure that someone has taken that one in, don't you think, Yeah, there's an Archimedes death right out there. Okay, alright, fine, our comedies deathrays taken. It's got to be. But it is a cool thing. The thing is is it's not mentioned.

It's mentioned a couple of times by some historians, even a A a couple that are fairly close who wrote fairly close after the Siege of Syracuse. Well, now, what's considered fairly close a couple hundred years, so Galen does not vol into that category about three fifty years after. Okay, so let's say Galen mentions it, but he doesn't call anything a death ray obviously. He he basically says, um

that Archimedes burned ships remotely. I don't remember exactly how he says it, but he just kind of he says that they Romans ships burned from Afar because of one of archimedes weapons, and he just mentions it. It's not until five a d. About seven hundred years after the fact that they named it, that a guy named Anthemius of Trellis, who is talking about mirrored surfaces, mentions off handedly that Archimedies probably used a mirrored parabola to burn

these ships. So it was known that Archimedes used something to burn ships remotely. Um. And then it's not until five D that Anthemius says this is probably what it was, and the idea of the Archimedes that's way really kind of took shape from there. Yeah. And if you've never seen one in action, because a lot of people tried to recreate these very successfully. Yeah, there's a that video. The nineteen year old kid in two thousand eleven named

Eric Jacques Mayne from Indiana. He built one out of a satellite dish and little discobald mirrorses and uh it worked like man, he could melt stuff and melt aluminum and catch things on fire and he's pretty ingenious. Somehow melted a rock or singe the rock somehow. Yeah, and he said it committed suicide. He thinks it burned itself in a barn, like the sun hit it wrong and it caught the barn on the fire. But apparently he's

making a new one. I don't know how he's coming along on that, Yeah, but it's a pretty interesting little video to watch. Yeah. But the idea is that you're using you're harnessing the energy of the sun just sort of like you would have a magnifying glass to create a very small focal point of extreme heat to catch a boat on fire. Right, And this is but this is from reflection. You're using mirrors. The more mirrored and polished the surfaces, the more um genuinely it reflects the

original beam of light back. And if you can take him and put him in a concave, uh parabola, you can focus them all to a point, like you said, And when you focus them on to that point, you have, however, many little mirrors reflections focus into a beam that you can use to set something remotely on fire. Now, did they have magnifying glasses at the time. They have mirrord surfaces, No, not mirrored, but did they have magnifying glasses they didn't

know they would have used mirrors. No, No, I'm not saying that. I'm asking if they had magnified glasses at the time. I don't believe. So, Okay, it's possible, because my I was wondering, if it's so much better than mirrors, why wouldn't they have used magnified glasses. And my only thing I'd come up with is maybe they didn't have them at the time. I don't know. I don't know how old magnifying glasses are it seems like that's something that would be pretty old. Yeah, you know, I don't know,

I'll look it up. Did they have they had glass back then? Right, surely, well if they had mirrors. Oh yeah, alright, So we did a podcast on mirrors. That was a good one. Yeah, surprisingly good one. Remember all the weird little fat x about mirrors. Pretty cool. They're creepy things. Yeah, and the more highly polished, we learned, the uh more energy they can bounce back at you. So that's what Archimedes used. Yeah, if you're using sunlight, sunlight has with

a heat energy, so you're bouncing heat energy back. And again, if you use a parabola with a bunch of different mirrors, you can concentrate that heat energy into one little spot and you can hit something and set it on fire, especially a wooden romanship. Yeah, and legend has it that

he burned a lot of them there in the Mediterranean Sea. Uh. They were parked anywhere from two hundred to a thousand feet away and he burned them all or not all, but enough to where they were like, we're getting out of here because I don't know what this death ray is, but it sucks. So, like you said, some people have

tried to recreate this um. In addition to Eric Jacques Maine Um of Indiana, a group of M I. T scientists created one in two thousand five, I think, and they it was a ten ft version of a Roman ship, just basically like the side of one, made of red oak and um. They used a hundred and twenty seven one ft square flat mirrors arranged in a prebble. And there's video of this on the web too. So it word caught it on fire, Yeah, after ten minutes of

sunlight uninterrupted by clouds. But that raises some issues here. Um, this boat was stationary. It was just like basically a a beam of wood was on top of the on the roof of a building and not in the sea. Yeah, and it wasn't moving. So if you are if your target is a boat, it's gonna move in the ocean. It's gonna have some sort of motion in the ocean. And um, that's gonna make the area that you're beams

hitting kind of jump all over the place. Well. Yeah, and the whole key to the death ray was you gotta have that fixed. It's got to sit there long enough to heat up. And if it's moving all over

the place. It's not gonna be effect although I bet some dudes on the boat as it passed by them were like, ah right, you know yeah, if you go, um the sovereign building, just one building over, it has um a bit of a convex or concave surface, and if you stand where it's reflecting that light, it is way hotter really than just like a foot over foot over this week just on the side one just dangerous. Good check it out. I don't know if it's dangerous,

it's uncomfortable for sure. So some other dudes called the MythBusters. Is that I was prounced MythBuster meath Meathbusters uh tried twice in seasons one and three, and both times they declared it busted because they could not recreate the death ray of Archimedes. But again the m I T Group was able to recreate it, and a Greek researcher in that's the one to me because he actually did that on a boat in the water. Yeah, he he set some rowboats that were on the water or a robot

on fire. But the way he got around the motion in the ocean was he used like fifty soldiers. He had live mirrors. Yeah, that could just adjust their position slightly to make up for the the ocean's emotion. That's pretty good idea. You got how many guys, fifty dudes with five ft by three ft mirrors? And I mean that's about the simplest way to recreate this. You don't have to build something. You just gotta have a lot

of mirrors and a lot of people. Yeah, and some time, right, and that's fine, and a Sicilian army that's not doing a whole lot, right then, I guess they weren't. So it is very possible for our committee's death ray to have existed, or for it to have worked. Whether it existed or not is highly unlikely. Here's some reasons. Ready, it was never used again. That's my biggest like sticking point is if it was a death ray and it worked so well, why didn't they ever use it again?

Another point, a lot of historians wrote about the Siege of Syracuse, they mentioned the iron claw, different historians. Nobody mentions the death ray until seven years after it's another sticking point. Could have been a h artistic license at work.

Maybe could have been um. Another thing is that even if it had been deployed in the field during the siege, Uh, Romans ships all had firefighters aboard, and they wouldn't have been too terribly threatened by something that caused like a smoldering fire that they could easily get to and put out. All you had to do is splash some water on that area and it would just completely undo any of the heat that you've generated in that spot. Hey, Hercules,

go pe on that exactly. Hercules, like, I compete on that plenty. That's my hercules and nice. Uh are those all the reasons that they Oh, there's a whole list of them. There's military practical, all sorts of reasons why it probably didn't exist. I'm surprised that some modern military force hasn't tried to do some sort of version of this, you know, like harness the sun to kill. We have missiles and guns, so we don't really need the sun.

He had like logs and Trey Boucher's. Yeah, but like you never know what if it was, I'm gonna get to work on it. Well, wait a minute, was it one of the Superman's that like a satellite like captures all the sunlight and then shoots it back. Was it a James Bond. There was some movie in like the late seventies or early eighties where that happened. Maybe Goldfinger. All right, have you to a kill Boy? That one? It's a stinker. It's the best one. Roberts with Christopher Walker, great, yeah,

Walking Grace, Grace Slick, No, Grace Jones. Yes, have you ever heard her cover of Joy Divisions? She's Lost Control? And that was good. It's like a like kind of like a reggae dub version of it. It's really good. Yeah, she what happened to her? I don't know? She was an odd duck, Grace Jones. If you listen to stuff, you should know right in and let us know how you're doing. Yeah. I mean the last thing I remember seeing her and was Boomerang Eddie Murphy movie. Remember she

wasn't that wasn't She was very funny in that. Actually, yeah, she's she's probably pretty cool. I bet she's very cool. Uh So that's Grace Jones. It's all there is to it. She did exist or did she um? If you want to learn more about Grace Jones or the Archimedes death rate, you can type Archimedes into the search bar at how Stuff Works dot com. And I'm not gonna spell that for you. You're gonna have to figure it out yourself. And since I said search parts time, then for the

listener mail, I'm gonna call this uh collagen or weird collagen. Hey, guys, I've been listening to your podcasts about broken bones and you mentioned the bottle role of collagen in the body. I figured to be a perfect opportunity to send in this email. I have this weird and rare condition called Eller's dan Los syndrome e d S. Have you ever heard of that? I didn't. Essentially, it's a defect in

the makeup of my collagen. It's almost like my collagen is chewing gum and keeps stretching and stretching and as a result, doesn't hold my joints in place. I've had hundreds, maybe even thousands of dislocations since it first started affecting me badly nine years ago, when I was eleven. Wow, every joint in my body has been dislocated at some point, the exception of my left elbow. Is it painful? It's got to be painful. Wow, we'll find out here in

a second. There's no cure for the condition, but my physiotherapy helps as it allows muscles to build up around the joints and stabilize them, thus doing the job that college and can't. My e d S is a lot better now my shoulders only ever dislocate every few weeks or so. Yeah, very tough. It's manageable with medication, and I'm proud to say I've made it through my first

year of university despite these occasional setbacks. It would be really cool if you could do a show on e d S, as it has a lot of different effects on its sufferers and it's pretty interesting. Uh. Finally, I want to thank you for providing me with hours and hours of entertainment and information during the long nights of being kept awake by pain. Oh no, it is painful and it's painful. Man, this is rough. I've learned a whole lot from you guys, and you never fail to

cheer me up. That is from George in Brighton, UK. George, you're a tough guy. In congratulations, I'm finishing your first year man at college. Yeah, my buddy Dave has a shoulder that dislocates quite a bit, or not quite a bit, but it happened five or six times since I've known him. Like George's not like George. Every couple of weeks is good for George. Yeah, hats off to you, George. Heck yeah, uh maybe we will do an E D Yester morn.

We have to look it up. If you want to tell us about a condition you have and ask us to do a podcast on it, there's nothing wrong with that. You can tweet to us at our Twitter handle it's a s y s K podcast. You can hang out with us on our Facebook page. That would be Facebook dot com slash w Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you can check out our super awesome website called stuff

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