Ancient Greece is the source of some of the world’s most prized treasures.
The civilisation was around for thousands of years, and its people were some of the most advanced of their time.
Pumping money and resources into the arts and sciences, the Greeks created and thought up many of the things used in modern society.
Many of the structures they built remain as strong as when they were erected, perhaps the most famous being Athens’ Parthenon.
They also created a number of smaller, unlikely devices, including what is believed to be the world’s first man-made alarm clock.
While ancient Greek engineer Ctesibius is said to have constructed something that resembled an alarm clock in Ancient Egypt, it is Plato who is cited with taking the basic design and thrusting it into modernity.
The story goes that he was unhappy with one of his students at the academy who kept oversleeping and missing class.
He took Ctesibius’s creation, which made use of gas or pressurised air to use water to drop peddles to signal a certain time, and added a tube to the filling vessel.
In doing so Plato fashioned a siphon inside the clock, and so when the water got high enough to fill the tube and start to spill over, all of the water was siphoned off into another vessel.
This vessel was largely closed off, but had thin openings, making it whistle like a tea kettle when it filled up quickly. The invention worked, and people soon began using it as an ‘alarm clock’ to wake them up on time. There are other inventions that the Ancient Greeks came up with far beyond their time.
One, believe it or not, is a fully automatic robot maid which could serve guests at a dinner party.
In the 3rd Century BC, the elite of society were introduced to Automate Therapaenis.
First mentioned by Philo Byzantios, the maid was a life-sized doll that held an oenochoe — a wine jug — in one hand, its other hand free to receive a drinking vessel.
Inside, a mechanism allowed the transfer of wine and water from two separate jugs that fed into the jug she held.
As a vessel was placed into her free hand, two pots inside her body interred and distributed the weight, with a tube passing along her hand to help the liquid on its way.
Another set of tubes ran through the free hand — the one that the cup would sit in — which helped the liquid pass through by using air.
When a person placed a drinking cup on the maid’s free hand the wine would be dispensed as the weight would push her left hand down and the key tubes were lifted.
The hole of one tube was aligned with the air tube connected to the container holding the wine, forcing air into it and wine to flow into the jug. A hole in the second, aligned with the air channel of the container holding the water, would simultaneously dilute the wine with water if desired.
When the cup was filled the hand holding it continued to sink because of the weight, and the passage of the water’s air channel was blocked so it stopped.
