Smart Ancients
One of the things which has always fascinated me are ancient structures and inventions. It is just amazing how smart the ancients were. Many inventions which come out today are based on inventions that appeared before them. The same is true for some of the ideas which have come to pass. Some of the ancients who invented things had nothing to base them on, nothing but their own imagination. This made their inventions even that much more impressive.
Some of the things which the ancients did we still have not been able to figure out. Examples of this are the gigantic Egyptian obelisks. When you see a granite stone carved into an obelisk that weighs many hundreds of tons it is impossible to imagine how it could be moved to a site which might be hundreds of miles away. We have studied the movement of these large stones by many different ancient civilizations and it is clear they had a secret which we have never discovered. Even with machines we employ today we would not have been able to move many of these huge stones. There is an unfinished Egyptian obelisk sitting in a quarry which is so large it is the size of a ship. The Egyptians had all intentions of using this massive stone before it developed a crack. It has become a tourist attraction.
The Romans accomplished many incredible building feats and were also able to move large stones, but to me one of the most amazing construction accomplishments made by the Romans was the fact they were able to build tunnels on two sides of a mountain at once and actually meet in the middle and only be off an inch or two. If I remember correctly when the Chunnel was built it was off more than that in the middle. Here were people with no electronic instruments of any type and without tunnel boring machines so how did they did get through a mountain in the first place? The would build a large fire against the stone of the mountain and when the stone got very hot they would pour water on it cracking the stone and then they would dig the cracked stone out and repeat the procedure until they went right through the mountain.
Before the Romans there were the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks were not only incredible builders, but they will also incredible inventors. There have been a lot of missed opportunities in our past, but maybe none so great as the opportunity missed by not developing the steam engine. 2000 years ago a Greek named Hero invented the first steam engine. There wasn’t much to it, but it possessed the potential for changing the world. The Greeks used hot water and steam power for a couple of things, but it soon was forgotten. Can you imagine what the world would have been like today if the steam engine had been developed by the ancient Greeks? We probably would have been thousands of years ahead in our technology. It has long been suspected that there were other world changing inventions made by the Greeks which time has forgotten about. Some say the plans for these inventions was stored in the library of Alexandria which was burnt to the ground by the Romans.
In 1856 Sir John Layard was exploring the 3000-year-old Palace of Nimrud when he found something which was unbelievable. It was a piece of crystal which had been shaped into a lens. Nimrud had been an Assyrian leader in what is known today as Iraq. The lens was roughly ground and people have been speculating for over a hundred years about what such a lens could have used for. There are those who believe the lens was the basis for a telescope. If this is true it would mean telescopes had been around for thousands of years more than we thought. This has all sorts of ramification and could have meant the ancients were a lot better versed in astronomy than we thought. When the crystal was checked for magnification properties it was found to be equivalent to about three times magnification. Its use has been debated and there are some who believe it was just a magnifying glass. Whatever it was used for, it demonstrates a knowledge we didn’t know the ancients had.
Back to the Romans. It is an amazing fact, but Roman concrete was far superior to the concrete used today. Not only was it far more durable, it was less environmentally damaging. Somehow the Romans figured out if you mix lime and volcanic rock and place it under water a chemical reaction will take place creating a very strong long-lasting structure as witnessed by Roman concrete which was recovered from the ocean after 2000 years. It was in amazing condition. Roman concrete was so advanced it is being studied today so that we may learn its secrets. Some engineers believe we can adopt this concrete in such a way as to be able to make it into containers to encapsulate hazardous waste. It is incredible when you think about it, we are trying to use advanced inventions from the past to solve problems now.
It is amazing to think that ancient people knew more about certain things than we do today. Scientists have found that ancient craftsmen were able to apply thin films of metal much more efficiently than we can today. Their methods were superior to those used in the production of DVDs, solar cells and such. These ancient craftsmen were able to make the coatings thinner, more uniform and adhere. This allowed them to save on the use of valuable metals. It makes you wonder how with all of our chemical knowledge we can’t figure this out. It is just another one of those incredible mysteries about the knowledge ancient people possessed.
The last thing I would like to talk about is something known as the Lycurgus Cup. Again this involves the Romans. The cup is about 1600 years old and changes color depending on the direction light hits it. This has puzzled scientists for years. When light hits the cup from the front it appears green, but when light hits it from the back it appears blood red. In 1990 scientists announced they solved the problem, somehow the Romans had managed to use nanotechnology when creating the cup. The scientists only found this out after examining the cup under a microscope. The Roman craftsmen had ground down particles of silver and gold until they were only 50 nanometers across and incorporated them into the cup. These particles were ground down so finely they were only about 1000th the diameter of a grain of salt. The particles vibrated in different ways depending upon the direction of the light.
