The Ancient Origin of the Jet Engine

The ball bearings. The computer. The steam engine. The flamethrower. What do all these have in common? Strangely enough, that they are all seemingly modern contraptions that have their roots in ancient history. Emperor Caligula bizarrely thought that the best use for the revolutionary ball bearings would be to rotate a statue devoted to an incestuous twin goddess. Meanwhile, his predecessors, in sacking the island of Rhodes, thought that the far beyond its time Antikythera Mechanism, by all means a clockwork computer, served better as booty from their conquest than anything else - and met its seeming end at the bottom of the Mediterranean. The steam engine and its cousin technologies were created by Archimedes to drive the Romans back from the city of Syracuse. The flamethrower was being used by Greeks such as the Thracians and Byzantines generations before the advent of napalm.

The ancient world really was a remarkable time period of discovery and innovation that was really only matched by the 20th century itself - where complex engineering, mathematics, architecture, and science brought civilizations to their seeming zenith.

By and large, it's commonly known that the Germans of World War II were working on a jet engine technology that would have allowed them to launch long range bomber missions into the United States. This is seen as remarkable - the creation of a technology well ahead of its time. But what they don't realize, however, is that the basic concepts behind a jet engine were not the ideas of Nazi Germany, who were actually playing catch up with a 2,000 year old scientific concept thought up in Alexandria, Egypt.

Heron (otherwise known as Hero) of Alexandria is considered to be among the most brilliant experimenters of antiquity - and was renown for his research in physics, engineering, and mathematics. There is some debate over what his exact bloodline consists of, but most scholars generally agree that he was Greek rather than Phoenician.

Most likely, he was educated Musaeum, which included a portion of the now destroyed Library of Alexandria, whose destruction is considered among history's greatest scholastic tragedies. Many of his notes and ideas are simply astounding, including ground breaking research into the theory of programmable machines, which some credit with the foundation of modern cybernetics.

The brilliance of Heron cannot be understated - for in a time when literacy was uncommon, and the only tools available were beyond crude by modern standards, he was concocting steam powered turbines, vending machines, and even a fully operational, self-powered clockwork play over a millennium before Doctor Phibes'.

His proposal for a prototype jet engine was based on the modern concept of the reaction-turbine principle. He called it the aeolipile, Latin meaning ball of Aeolus, the Greek god of wind. The turbine concept behind it was so advanced, that it didn't receive the recognition it deserved at the time because man simply had no clue the potential power of a steam engine. Therefore, it was primarily used both as a toy, and to open heavy temple doors.

Heron, in his own notes, describes his aeolipile as such:

"A hollow globe rotates on two bearings A and B, which is hollow, and through the pipe GB rises steam from a boiler C. In escaping through the nozzles X and Y, which are bent at right angles to the axis of the globe, it causes the globe to spin round merrily."

This simple concept, using a series of laws Newton hadn't written yet, would later trigger the industrial revolution. But for the ancient Heron of Alexandria, it was resigned to a temple door opener.

Sources:

The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Ancient Rome
Wikipedia - Aeolipile
Wikipedia - Hero of Alexandria
University of Iowa