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Archimedes and Hero at the Paideia Museum in Storrs, CN

During the American Classical League Institute at Storrs, Connecticut in 2015, I was able to visit the Hellenic Society Paideia Museum, which houses a collection of instruments and models of various devices designed by Archimedes of Syracuse and Hero of Alexandria. I've added pictures of many of these to this lecture, so you can get some idea of what the working devices would actually look like.

Archimedes

Archimedes' water clock. Water levels in a series of bowls governed the location of floats, which were pushed up or pulled down as the levels changed. These in turn drove gears which caused the small gold figures to rise and fall at set rates indicating the passage of hours and minutes, and the eyes of the face to move back and forth.

Archimedes' cannon also worked on a steam principle. A weapon beam was loaded into the main bore and secured in front with a weak wooden cross beam. Water poured into the funnel was stored in the small cylindrical cistern while the large boiler at the bottom of the cannon was heated to a red-hot condition. The water was dumped into the boiler and immediately turned to steam. The expanding steam pushed the weapon up the tube and brok the weak wooden crossbeam, launching the weapon and its cargo. The basic design of this cannon was used until the 15th century, when Leonardo da Vinci redesigned it.

Hero

Hero's "steam engine" or aeolosphere. Water in the kettle below was heated to a boil. The steam from the boiling water flowed up the supporting pipes and into the ball. When the steam was ejected from the bent "jets", the ball spun in place.

The chirping bird works on a hydraulic principle that takes advantage of air pressure as well as water pressure. When someone entered the building (a temple by design), the door motions would cause the large gear to turn, dropping an inverted container filled with air (the small drum) into a bucket of water. This forced air out of the inverted container through a pipe with an embedded reed in the bird, to make a bird-like noise. At the same time, the moving gear also turned secondary gears that caused the bird to move.

The door alarm operated in a very straightforward way. Opening the door pulls a rope that one end of a bar up, pushing the other end down, and forcing the trumpet-shaped tube into a tube of water. Water pushed the air in the trumpet past its valve, causing it to sound.

Combining principles from the door alarm and chirping bird designs, Hero made an automaton that provided synchronized sound and motion. As water flows into the primary sealed container on the upper shelf, air was forced up pipes and past reeds in the birds, causing them to chirp. When the water reached a certain level in the upper chamber, it begain to drain into the lower vessel, causing it to sink and pull on a chain which then rotated the rod supporting the owl, so that the owl turned toward the birds. At the same time, this drained the upper chamber, and the birds stopped chirping. Once the upper chamber started to refill, the sequence would automatically repeat.

In one of the more popular of Hero's designs, a system water reservoirs and steam pipes connected the doors of the temple to the surface of the altar. Burning a sacrifice on the altar heated one reservoir and caused steam to flow in one direction, forcing the doors open. When the altar surface cooled, the steam condensed, pulling the doors shut again.

Hero's pantograph (shown in the two pictures below) could be used to reproduce a drawing to a different scale, larger or smaller, as required.

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