The innovative ancients

Plato’s Alarm Clock And Other Amazing Ancient Inventions  

James M Russell 

Hachette India

192 pages; Rs 399

In Plato’s Alarm Clock, James M Russell describes hundreds of ancient devices, inventions and breakthroughs from around the world and across the centuries. He has attempted to provide a glimpse into past eras that he says were far more technologically complex than we realise. The inventions are grouped into six categories — everyday life, mechanical and industrial technology, breakthroughs that remain mysteries to this day, military inventions, medical knowledge, and scientific advances — with a chapter devoted to each. 

He says in the Introduction: “We’re not necessarily any cleverer than our ancestors — we just have an accumulation of centuries of technological progress on which we can rely. Many of the ancients were more advanced than we realise.” Humankind has the internet, space flight, impressive medical knowledge and self-driving cars to prove its smartness. But, he writes, if we were stranded on a desert island tomorrow, “most of us would have no clue how to start a fire or catch a fish, let along rebuild all that extraordinary technology we rely on".

The Greeks, the Romans and the Chinese appear to have been the most inventive. The Greek philosopher, Plato (427–347 BCE) wanted a way to rouse himself and his students in time for lessons; as a result, he became the inventor of an alarm clock with a whistling sound for the alarm. The Romans’ metalwork was so precise that they were able to create the warded lock, in which internal obstructions ensured that only the right key would open the lock. Their concrete was also remarkably durable, especially when used in sea walls, breakers and piers. The harbour at Caesarea in Israel, built late in the first century BCE, is made of concrete so hard that it has retained its shape through the centuries. 

The first mechanical fire-fighting equipment was developed by two Greeks who lived in Alexandria three centuries apart. Ctesibius, a physicist, invented a powerful water pump in the third century BCE, and Hero adapted this in the first century CE into the world’s first-known fire engine, which used a combination of pistons, cylinders and valves to direct water onto a blaze. He invented the world’s first vending machine as well, which provided a measure of holy water in return for a five-drachma coin, while Ctesibius also created the world’s first pipe organ, on which the design of modern piano keyboards is based. And the modern machine gun had an ancient Greek version invented by Dionysius of Alexandria in the third century BCE — the polybolos, magazine-fed and loaded with bolts, which it could fire at remarkable speed. 

India finds two mentions, for plastic surgery and mathematics. The Sushruta Samhita (sixth century BCE), one of the founding texts of Ayurveda, contains instructions for over 300 surgical procedures (including nose reconstruction). Arabic translations preserved this knowledge and eventually spread it to the West during the Renaissance. The second mention is for a momentous innovation in the fifth century CE, when Indian mathematicians started treating zero as a real number, making it easier to imagine and express large numbers. Imagining a number like a million using Greek and Roman numerals was cumbersome, whereas Indian mathematicians simply wrote a one followed by six zeros. “This revolutionised the way that calculations were performed, and laid the groundwork for the arithmetic we all now learn in school,” writes Mr Russell.

As for the Chinese, they had a truly impressive array of achievements, quite apart from inventing gunpowder, the nautical compass, printing and papermaking, as three examples show. Zhang Heng, a polymath, invented the first seismometer or seismograph (an instrument that measures earthquakes and volcanic activity) in the second century CE; rockets were used in a naval exercise by China’s Song dynasty as early as 1245 CE; and, though it was the Roman Empire whose town councils first provided a public physician for ordinary citizens, the Chinese took this idea further, with a system of publicly employed doctors paid for by the central government. Set up in major cities in the second century BCE, it was extended to the whole country by the first century CE. 

Plato’s Alarm Clock, fascinating and easy to read, ends on a sobering note. Mr Russell writes since history has had its dark ages during which knowledge has been lost and the human condition deteriorated, there is no guarantee that the technology which we take for granted today will still exist a millennium from now. After all, there are ancient technologies that surpass our present-day knowledge. We do not know, for instance, how to make Damascus steel (manufactured in West Asia between 300 and 1700 CE), which was once the hardest metal in the world; or how the Mayans made weather-proof pigments; or the secrets of “Greek fire”, a mysterious Byzantine chemical that burned in water and whose use in battle was much feared in ancient times.

However, we can take comfort from the thought that every bit of technology that we use today was once a pipe dream. Human ingenuity, Mr Russell concludes, can be relied upon to continue transforming the world.