Ancient Greek Geeks Got It Right

Oct. 17, 2007 — -- Mark Schiefsky has spent years studying ancient Greek manuscripts, trying to figure out how some of the earliest geeks produced mechanical devices that were at least as important to them as computers are to us.

Schiefsky is a professor of classics at Harvard University and an expert on Greek antiquities, and he is puzzled by the fact that as early as the fifth century B.C., the marketplace in Athens had pretty sophisticated devices for weighing merchandise based on the leverage that can result from an uneven balance bar.

He's puzzled, because the theory of levers wasn't developed until Archimedes came onto the scene in the third century B.C., more than 100 years later.

"It seems clear that there were these balances with unequal arms around before Archimedes," said Schiefsky, one of several scholars who are studying ancient Greek manuscripts at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

That flies in the face of the way science and technology work today.

First, there is mathematics, the science of dealing with the measurement, properties and relationships of quantities, and then there is theory, a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena. With both of those tools in hand, experimenters can then go forth and develop the tools to do the work.

But the ancient Greeks got it backward. With very little in the way of mathematics, and even less in science theory, they came up with some really clever gizmos.

"When you say balance, everybody thinks you mean something like the scales of justice with two equal arms and the scale pans on each side," Schiefsky said in an interview. "I was surprised to learn that there were also balances with unequal arms."

The balances used by the ancient Greeks looked sort of like an old-fashioned teeter-totter, with the balance point, or fulcrum, located off-center. That allowed them to weigh, or move, a heavy load with a lighter weight.

"How can you move a 100-pound weight with 10 pounds?" Schiefsky asked. "You can do it if you put the 100-pound weight 10 times closer to the fulcrum."