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Archimedes Death Ray
Werner Heuser writes "Ancient Greek and Roman historians recorded that during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, Archimedes (a notably smart person) constructed a burning glass to set the Roman warships, anchored within bow and arrow range, afire. The story has been much debated and oft dismissed as myth ... Intrigued by the idea and an intuitive belief that it could work, MIT's 2.009ers decided to apply the early product development 'sketch or soft modeling' process to the problem."
...tackled the Archimedes Death Ray on Episode 16: Ancient Death Ray, Skunk Cleaning, What Is Bulletproof?.
The Mythbusters did an experiment on this a few months ago. Go to the discovery channel website, lookup mythbusters and then look for the mirror experiment there.
If I'm not incorrectly informed, the boat hulls of those old warships were painted with olive oil in order to cause less friction against the water and thus achieve greater speeds.
:(
Since olive oil has a far lower ignition temperature than wood, this would have helped Archimedes tremendously and made up for a lot of other possible shortcomings in quality of mirrors, precision of aiming etc.
Doesn't seem like either the Mythbusters or these guys knew about this very crucial piece of information...
What about Greek Fire?
It's worth pointing out that the availability of really useful materials for incendiary warfare was notably lacking in the ancient world at this time.
Aside, of course from the significant exception of Greek Fire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire
-Styopa
"Really, really, really smart people 2000 years ago were probibally really, really smarter than most people now."
HAHAHAHAH! What scientific evidence do you have for this? This doesn't even MAKE SENSE. Why would smart people have been smarter then?
Oh, and the pyramids could be built today if we were willing to spend decades or centuries working people to death to create them. Nothing mystical there. Hell, with our modern machines (created by us stupid modern people) we can create buildings much, much larger than the pyramids those ancients geniuses created.