5 Ancient Greek Inventions You Probably Didn't Know About

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The ancient Greeks are known for their many contributions to society and most of these we are pretty familiar with, but instead of rehashing those and doing yet another video on the Antikythera mechanism, today we are going to go over five somewhat lesser known inventions we still use today that have the Greeks to thank for.

Alarm Clocks
Even though nowadays the alarm clock has been watered down to the point where in most cases now all it is is a phone app, the alarm clock actually traces its roots all the way back to Ancient Greece with Plato himself possessing one of the earliest known examples in history. Here the most accurate clocks were water clocks that told time by the regular dripping of water from one tank with the amount of water in a tank used to determine the time. Now this type of clock was in existence for a very long time at this point and replaced the sundial to remain the most accurate way to tell time all the way until the 1600s when they were replaced with pendulum clocks. But the Greeks were the first to be recorded as modifying them to include various alarm systems that would be triggered by the clock mechanism. This would be done by mechanisms similar to water organs or pebbles being dropped on gongs. You see at this point in history water clocks had advanced pretty far past two buckets with a hole in one. They already had some advanced implements to determine the changing hours and making it so that they could be supplied by a continually running water source so that there wasn’t the need to constantly have to fill or exchange buckets. Because of these advancements you now have the Greeks to thank every time you hit that snooze button.

Stadiums
Although many attribute stadiums to the Romans because of the colosseum, that doesn’t mean they can be credited with their creation. It may be the best known ancient stadium, but stadia owe their roots to the ancient Greeks. In fact the word stadium comes from the greek stadion which was a measure of length, not a location. One stadion was equal to 600 feet and at this time one foot was not standardized so it did vary from location to location. So how did this length turn into a place to view sports? Well the first stadiums were really just a location created for sprinting events, where the competitors would run one stadium in length and the earliest ones were very simple in construction. The oldest stadium, the stadium at olympia pictured here dates back to 776 BC and was just made of hardened clay with stone markers for the starting and finish line along with starting blocks. The location also had sloped hills for spectators and it was used during the olympic games to determine who was the fastest person in the world or well at least in ancient Greece. These later evolved further into having seating for the larger and larger crowds they attracted, which brings us to our next invention….

Theater
Athens, one of the most well known Greek city states, was the birthplace of western theater. And like many births it was preceded by a bunch of drunken festivities. You see the city had a lot of festivals and they were a pretty big deal. So much so that attendance as an audience member was mandatory for citizenship at the City Dionysia, which was a huge event celebrating the god Dionysius. Now early theater was not just comprised of comedies and tragedies, but there was also a third type: the Satyr play which was both part comedy and tragedy and were generally centered around mythological heroes. Large crowds would come to see these and as they grew popular they would build full amphitheaters with stone seating arranged in semicircles around an orchestra, and stage. These construction techniques to make these buildings in time merged with ancient stadiums and eventually led to what became the modern stadiums and theaters we know today.

Catapult
Tracing its roots to the crossbow the Greeks created the changes necessarily to cement the creation of the catapult. They first started as just massive crossbows, but the Greeks used their knowledge of geometry and physics along with some of the earliest studies of ballistics and siege warfare to lead to many advances in catapult design. They were the first to start using torsion as a means of storing potential energy in later catapult designs and the study and use of catapults was so commonplace in greek culture that many children were instructed in how to use catapults as evidenced by an inscription found on the island of Ceos about the regulating of catapult competitions for the young. Torsion based catapults were so revolutionary that they helped military conquerors of the time like Alexander the Great succeed in their campaigns and they may have used these catapult building competitions to try to determine who may end up being a good future military leader.

The odometer
Now we don’t know exactly who invented the odometer or when but we do know it was likely the ancient Greeks and that is because of Alexander the Great. Why is that, because there were accurate accounts of the distances he traveled around 330 BC. And I mean eerily accurate for the time. For example the distance given between Hecatompylos and Alexandria Areion only deviated by 0.2% of the actual distance. Which is even more impressive when you realize the distance between them was 531 miles. This leads most people to believe that there must have been a device that could be used to measure these distances with such a high degree of accuracy, but that it was just not kept in the historical record of the time or at least not in anything we have found yet. The first recorded accounts of an odometer that we know about come from Vetruvius in the first century BC, which was a cart on chariot wheels that would turn 400 times for each Roman mile, and with each revolution of the wheel it would engage and turn a cogwheel with 400 teeth. Thus every time the cogwheel turned a complete revolution, that meant that they had travelled exactly one mile. Each turn of the cogwheel would engage another gear that would drop a single pebble into a box for every mile and so at the end of the trip all you had to do was count the pebbles in the box and you would know the distance traveled.

And that’s it for this video. Hopefully at least some of those were new to you. Either easy I am Frank Cioppettini with Servetty Software and I will see you in the next one!

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