The Greek ship Syracuse was not just a boat.
With a loading capacity of 1,800 tons and space for 1,942 passengers, it was one of the largest ships of antiquity.
The ivory and marble decorations made it look like a floating palace.
On the deck there were mosaics covering the entire deck Iliad It depicts Homer’s epic poem, according to the writer Athenaeus.
But the new ship wasn’t the only thing that attracted attention when it arrived around 240 BC. She left the dry dock of the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily.
The craft was lifted into the water using a mechanical device that no one had ever seen before.
The device, which consisted of an ingenious system of ropes, pulleys and handles, was operated by one man: the inventor himself, the mathematician Archimedes.
The great ship “moved in a straight line, as smoothly as if at sea,” the Greek historian Plutarch writes in amazement.
It is said that Archimedes lifted the ship from the dock easily without causing it to capsize. This was probably too good to be true, even though there was a lot going for the mechanical device.
The pulley, the invention that gave Archimedes superhuman powers, would forever change not only ancient Greece but the entire world.
