Curated category
Ancient inventions
- WatermillA watermill turns flowing water into work. Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls, wrote the Greek epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica…
- ToiletA toilet is a piece of sanitary hardware that collects human waste, and 419 million people have no access to one at all.
- Roman concreteRoman concrete, known in Latin as opus caementicium, has outlasted almost everything else its builders made. Aqueducts, reservoirs, and bridges constructed…
- GlassblowingGlassblowing begins with a single breath. A glassblower gathers molten glass onto the end of a blowpipe, raises it to their lips, and exhales.
- Paper moneyPaper money began as a written promise long before it became a physical form of currency, and the earliest surviving trace of that promise sits in the Code…
- CompassA compass is a device that shows the cardinal directions, but its oldest surviving ancestor was never meant to guide anyone anywhere.
- Armillary sphereThe armillary sphere sits at the center of the Portuguese national flag, a skeleton of metal rings that once helped sailors navigate the Age of Exploration.
- TragedyTragedy names something both ancient and familiar. The word itself is Greek for "goat song," and for two and a half millennia it has described a particular…
- LeverA lever is a beam or rigid rod pivoted at a fixed hinge, and with one of them a person can claim to move the world. The Greek mathematician Archimedes is…
- OrreryThe device pulled from a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 was an orrery. It had rested on the floor of the Mediterranean for roughly…