1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

4.10 The Lost Technology 119
have seen it; but I know a scholar who has contrived to flesh out the
design. 141
At fist sight this may seem like a list of wishful fantasies. But first of all
some objects mentioned are real: weight-lifting machines had certainly
been built in antiquity with greater efficiency that in Bacon’s Europe. For
other objects it is easy to identify a literary origin: the diver used by the
Macedonian ruler appears in the Romance of Alexander, 141a a Greek source
which Bacon seems to be indirectly acquainted with, and rich in legendary
elements that would not be easily recognized as such in the thirteenth
century. In other cases it is not hard to separate the distortions from a
probable kernel of preexisting truth: the machine with which a single man
could drag a thousand was of course unfeasible, but replacing “drag” by
“balance” we have a machine of high mechanical advantage, such as the
ones used for lifting weights. The brief description of the machine that
flies by flapping its wings (which Bacon himself expresses doubts about)
belongs to a tradition whose origin is not easy to trace, but some of whose
developments are easily recognized: the idea was taken up again in very
like terms by Leonardo da Vinci, after whom Rome’s airport is named.
One wonders whether the self-propelled cars and the rowerless ships,
admittedly exaggerated in Bacon’s rendition, are related to real objects;
quite likely they originate in ancient sources, perhaps less fantastic than
the Romance of Alexander, because Polybius records a self-moving engine
displayed in a procession 142 and rowerless ships are illustrated in the De
rebus bellicis. 143
141
Roger Bacon, Epistola de secretis operibus, IV (a very loose translation is given in [Bacon/Davis],
pp. 26–27).
141a
Historia Alexandri Magni, II, 38.
142
Polybius, Historiae, XII, 13, 11. His description is taken from Demochares. The machine was
built in Athens by Demetrius Phalerius (who later became one of the main inspirers of the cultural
politics of the early Ptolemies) at the close of the fourth century B.C.
143
De rebus bellicis, xvii and preceding illustration = [RB/Ireland], pp. 10–11 and Tabula XI. These
are paddleboats, which the anonymous author of the fourth century A.D. thought were moved by
oxen, through a mechanism similar to the sakiyeh.
Revision: 1.14 Date: 2002/10/24 04:25:47