Archimedes' Screw - History

History

The invention of the water screw is credited to the Greek polymath Archimedes of Syracuse in the 3rd century BC. Its tentative attribution to the 6th century BC Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II by the assyriologist Dalley or to pre-Hellenistic Egypt has been refuted on the grounds of "the total lack of any literary and archaeological evidence for the existence of the water-screw before ca. 250 BC". The German engineer Konrad Kyeser, in his Bellifortis (1405), equips the Archimedes screw with a crank mechanism. This mechanism soon replaced the ancient practice of working the pipe by treading.

Read more about this topic:  Archimedes' Screw

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.
    Terri Apter (20th century)

    Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    ... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.
    Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)