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Today's Featured Biography
Archimedes
 It is scarcely possible to view the vast steamships of our day without reflecting that to a great master of mechanics, upward of two thousand years since, we in part owe the invention of the machine by which these mighty vessels are propelled upon the wide world of waters. This power is an application of "the Screw of Archimedes," the most celebrated of the Greek geometricians. He was born in Sicily, in the Corinthian colony of Syracuse, in the year 287 B.C., and when a very young man, was fortunate enough to enjoy the patronage of his relative Hiero, the reigning prince of Syracuse.
The ancients attribute to Archimedes more than forty mechanical inventions--among which are the endless screw; the combination of pulleys; an hydraulic organ, according to Tertullian; a machine called the helix, or screw, for launching ships; and a machine called loculus, which appears to have consisted of forty pieces, by the putting together of which various objects could be framed, and which were used by boys as a sort of artificial memory.
Archimedes is said to have obtained the friendship and confidence of Hiero by the following incident. The king had delivered a certain weight of gold to a workman, to be made into a crown. When the crown was made and sent to the king, a suspicion arose in the royal mind that the gold had been adulterated by the alloy of a baser metal, and he applied to Archimedes for his assistance in detecting the imposture; the difficulty was to measure th...
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