Pinhole cameras are associated with bearded Victorians producing moody daguerreotypes in darkrooms. Yet the principles were noticed before 350BC by Chinese philosophers and Aristotle (who had a finger in every pie). It wasn’t until the middle ages that these ideas were unravelled experimentally by Islamic polymath Alhazen. The equipment is simple – a box with a pinhole through which light enters, projecting the scene upside down on the back. The first snap wasn’t taken for 900 years
Illustration: Jack Hudson for the Observer
Scientific instruments don’t have to look like Bakelite shoeboxes. The earliest earthquake-sensing device, or seismoscope, was astonishingly ornate, and would have looked good on any modish coffee table. Not that coffee tables were a thing back then. Composed of a large vessel with eight dragons around the top, it could detect tremors hundreds of miles away. When a quake was sensed by the pendulum, a dragon would drop a bronze ball into a toad’s mouth, indicating direction
Illustration: Jack Hudson for the Observer
Archimedes is arguably more famous for his bath-time antics than for bilge pumping, yet removing water from the bowels of ships was an early use for his eponymous screw. Composed of a rigid helix around a tilted pipe, the screw, when turned, lifts water to higher levels. This nifty device was used to stabilise the leaning tower of Pisa in 2001 by delicately removing saturated layers of subsoil; other applications range from sewage pumps to irrigation and chocolate fountains
Illustration: Jack Hudson for the Observer
Fished out of a Roman shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera mechanism is considered to have been the world’s first analogue computer and, aptly, is about the size of a laptop. Used to calculate astronomical positions, predict eclipses and model other heavenly movements, it had an intricate mechanism of more than 30 bronze gears, and is thought to have been built by the Greeks (Archimedes apparently had a similar one)
Illustration: Jack Hudson for the Observer
Looking for all the world like a soup ladle, this is in fact an early compass, with the spoon’s handle pointing south. Formed of a bronze plate attached to an instrument made of magnetic ore, it was designed to help users navigate the twists and turns of life and death rather than offer geographic pointers. A board covered in characters indicates directions and the Earth, while the circle represents the heavens, and the spoon, the Ursa Major constellation
Illustration: Jack Hudson for the Observer
The Duracell bunny might be a modern phenomenon but the battery has been around a while. Generally held to have been invented by Alessandro Volta in Italy in the 1800s, there is evidence of an earlier incarnation. In the 1930s ancient jars were found in Iraq, containing iron rods in copper cylinders that had previously held an acid, such as vinegar. Proof that they were the first batteries is lacking, but replicas filled with grape juice have generated a voltage
Illustration: Jack Hudson for the Observer
