Greene County herald. (Leakesville, Miss.) 1898-current, 1909-11-12
a Romance
ofProgress
Ry ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
ARCHIMEDE S- The Absent
Minded Discoverer.
Ry ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

Through the crowded streets Of
the ancient Sieilian city of Syracuse
one day late in the third century,
B. c., rushed an elderly man, bald,
wild of eye, long of beard. He was
yelling at intervals the Greek word
''Eureka!" CT have discovered it!")
Not stitch of clothing covered him.
Nor was he aware of his own nude
state until arrested by the scandalized
authorities.
The man who thus unconventional
ly burst upon the public gaze was
Archimedes, greatest of old-time in
ventorS and mathematicians. The rea-
son for his peculiar action was that
certain amazing discovery he had
just worked out had so elated him
that he absent-mindedly forgot every
thing else in the joy of the moment.
And this is how the discovery was
made: King Hero, Greek ruler of
Syracuse, had ordered a heavy and
beautiful gold crown constructed for
himself. He had reason to suspect
that the jeweler to whom he had in
trusted the task had cheated him by
mixing quantity of alloy with the
gold that went into the making of this
royal emblem But Hero had no
means of proving his suspicious. He
therefore sent for Archimedes, whom
he admired as the wisest man in his
realm, and asked him to find out some
way whereby he could make certain
Of the presence and exact amount of
alloy in the crown
Archimedes undertook the problem,
though he had no reason for suppos-
ing he could solve it. For days the
matter was ever on his mind. One
morning while
A strange Prob thus wondering he
Ien' anu IT'S stepped into his
Solving. bo+b As bo asd CO
he noticed that the tub, already full
to the brim, overfowed when his body
entered the water This was q sin-
pie phenomenon. A million people
had observed similar action on the
part of water, but to none of them
had it suggested any especial idea.
To Archimedes, however, the Incl
dent meant something. He instantly,
while still bathing, set to work on the
great "Archimedes Principle" still in
use. This principle, briefly, asserts
that any object plunged into liquid
sustains an upward pressure equal to
the weight of the water it displaces.
n nf hot hn i'm
mersed loses as much weight while
under water as the weight of an equal
volume of the liquid itself. From this
it was but step for him to figure out
an absurdly simple plan for determin-
ing the amount of alloy in Hiero's
crown. He would drop the crown into
vessel full of water and then, after
removing it, drop in an equal weight
of gold and watch the difference of
the two overfows.
Delighted at this double mental
feat, Archimedes leaped from the
bath and out into the streets shout
ing abroad his great discovery. He
was heavily fined for his indecorous
action and rewarded by Hero with a
laurel crown for his invention.
Nor was this the only scientific dis
covery Archimedes made in Hiero's
behalf. The king had a magnificent
galley whose hola Decame TuH of wa
ter. With the. primitive appliances
of the time it was well-nigh impoS-
sible to bail it.. He appealed to Arch
imedes. The latter Planned out a wa
ter-tight cylinder, which should run
from the bottom of the hold to the
upper air. Inside this cylinder he
arranged a long, spiral, close-fitting
screw, air tight, and twisted by a
crank from above. By turning this
screw the water was of course drawn
up from the hold through the cylinder.
In mathematics Archimedes excelled
all men of his century. He worked out
the mutual relations between sphere
and cylinder and the measurement of
a circle and made
Oev'ses war En- known the science
glnes Against of leverage. The
Citys Foes. complex crank-and-
pulley are also If his devising. By
his various discoveries and inventions
he founded the entire art of mechan-
les in use to-day To no other man do
mechanics, mathematics and physics
owe so much.
Those were the days of Greek de-
cadence. Marcellus, the Roman gen
| eral, besieged Syracuse. Archimedes
at once turned his talents to account
1 1r dou;e;pn nofoDuIto ond other war
engines that worked havoc on the in
vaders. He is even said to have ar
ranged a collection of burning glasses
in such a way as to set fire once to
the attacking Roman fleet
Marcellus, like all the world, re-
] garded Archimedes with reverential
awe. He gave strict orders that, in
case the city should be captured
Archimedes and all his property were
to be spared. But when, in 212 B. c..
the Romans, after a three years
siege, stromed Syracuse, Archimedes
/ fell victim to his own absent-minded
ness.
The victorious soldiers, rushing
through the city, came upon man
rs years old, seated in the middle OF
the market-place, tracing geometrical
figures in the sand with the point OF
his staff. 1t was Archimedes. He
was so absorbed in puzzling out
problem in mathematics that he did
not even know the city was captured
AS the soldiers ran up he cried warn
ingly:
Don't disturb my figures with YOU
great stamping feet!"
The next instant a half dozen spear
points passed through his body.
(CopyriglHed)