“father of systematic astronomy.”
CTESIBIUS AND HERO: MAGICIANS OF ALEXANDRIA
Just about the time when Hipparchus was working out at Rhodes his puzzles of celestial mechanics, there was a man in Alexandria who was exercising a strangely inventive genius over mechanical problems of another sort; a man who, following the example set by Archimedes a century before, was studying the problems of matter and putting his studies to practical application through the invention of weird devices. The man’s name was Ctesibius. We know scarcely more of him than that he lived in Alexandria, probably in the first half of the second century B.C. His antecedents, the place and exact time of his birth and death, are quite unknown.
Neither are we quite certain as to the precise range of his studies or the exact number of his discoveries. It appears that he had a pupil named Hero, whose personality, unfortunately, is scarcely less obscure than that of his master, but who wrote a book through which the record of the master’s inventions was preserved to posterity. Hero, indeed, wrote several books, though only one of them has been preserved. The ones that are lost bear the following suggestive titles: On the Construction of Slings; On the Construction of Missiles; On the Automaton; On the Method of Lifting Heavy Bodies; On the Dioptric or Spying-tube. The work that remains is called Pneumatics, and so interesting a work it is as to make us doubly regret the loss of its companion volumes.
Had these other books been preserved we should doubtless have a clearer insight than is now possible into some at least of the mechanical problems that exercised the minds of the ancient philosophers. The book that remains is chiefly concerned, as its name implies, with the study of gases, or, rather, with the study of a single gas, this being, of course, the air. But it tells us also of certain studies in the dynamics of water that are most interesting, and for the historian of science most important.
Unfortunately, the pupil of Ctesibius, whatever his ingenuity, was a man with a deficient sense of the ethics of science. He tells us in his preface that the object of his book is to record
some ingenious discoveries of others, together with additional discoveries of his own, but nowhere in the book itself does he give us the, slightest clew as to where the line is drawn between the old and the new. Once, in discussing the weight of water, he mentions the law of Archimedes regarding a floating body, but this is the only case in which a scientific principle is traced to its source or in which credit is given to any one for a discovery. This is the more to be regretted because Hero has discussed at some length the theories involved in the treatment of his subject. This reticence on the part of Hero, combined with the fact that such somewhat later writers as Pliny and Vitruvius do not mention Hero’s name, while they frequently mention the name of his master, Ctesibius, has led modern critics to a somewhat sceptical attitude regarding the position of Hero as an actual discoverer.
The man who would coolly appropriate some discoveries of others under cloak of a mere prefatorial reference was perhaps an expounder rather than an innovator, and had, it is shrewdly suspected, not much of his own to offer. Meanwhile, it is tolerably certain that Ctesibius was the discoverer of the principle of the siphon, of the forcing-pump, and of a pneumatic organ. An examination of Hero’s book will show that these are really the chief principles involved in most of the various interesting mechanisms which he describes. We are constrained, then, to believe that the inventive genius who was really responsible for the mechanisms we are about to describe was Ctesibius, the master. Yet we owe a debt of gratitude to Hero, the pupil, for having given wider vogue to these discoveries, and in particular for the discussion of the principles of hydrostatics and pneumatics contained in the introduction to his book. This discussion furnishes us almost our only knowledge as to the progress of Greek philosophers in the field of mechanics since the time of Archimedes.