Theater of Machines, Volume 4

...among them a considerable number have almost always been found, from whom I will mention only a few of the most prominent here. And firstly, there is no Adam. doubt that our first father, Adam, by divine inspiration, was experienced in the best of the mathematical arts, who propagated such to his Abraham. descendants up to the patriarch Abraham, through whom they became known to the Chaldeans and Egyptians and were in flore in bloom/flourishing among them for a long time: until finally the wise man Thales of Miletus, after he had traveled to Egypt for the sake of study, approximately 600 years before Christ's birth, brought these glorious arts with him to Greece, his fatherland, Pythagoras. Democritus. Archytas. and planted them there. Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, and other excellent mathematicians followed him and invented much more. Yet Archytas of Tarentum was the first who directed the mathematical arts into practice and invented all manner of mechanical works, but especially many kinds of war-instruments and machines: in the way that he was military commander five times in his aforementioned fatherland and always obtained victory against his enemies with this speed. Gellius. Book 10, ch. 12. Gellius writes he had prepared, among other things, a wooden pigeon so artfully with hidden weights and enclosed air that when it was swung into the air, it subsequently flew off by itself. After him Archimedes, Athenaeus book 5 ch. 7, Proclus l. 2 ch. 3, Livius, Polybius, Plutarch, Joan. Tzetzes part 1, cap. 35. came Eudoxus and Aristotle, who taught mechanics publicly. But Archimedes, who lived 200 years before Christ's birth, surpassed them all, for he brought mechanics to such a height that he once in Syracuse, in Sicily, in the presence of King Hieron and countless multitudes of people, pulled a very large cargo ship from the land into the sea with the left hand alone, by means of the winch and the trispasti three-pulley system, which all of Sicily could not have managed to do. For when Marcellus the Roman camped near Syracuse with an unspeakably large armada or ship-