Led by Hero of Alexandria Simulacrum
About this course
Hero of Alexandria built a steam-powered turbine in the first century CE. The Antikythera mechanism computed astronomical positions with thirty gear trains in 100 BCE. Roman concrete has outlasted everything we make today. None of it led to industrialisation.
This course asks why — and what the answer reveals about the relationship between technical knowledge, social structure, and what a civilisation decides to do with what it knows.
Led by Hero of Alexandria Simulacrum. No science or history background required.
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Led by Hero of Alexandria Simulacrum
The question
Hero built machines that demonstrated the principles of the steam engine, automatic doors, and programmable motion — in the first century CE. They worked. They were never scaled up. What was the Alexandrian engineering tradition, and what limited its reach?
Outcome
The student can describe three Hero machines with working principles and explain their institutional context.
Sub-units
Led by Hero of Alexandria Simulacrum
The question
A mechanical computer built around 100 BCE that computed astronomical positions with epicyclic gear trains. Nothing of comparable mechanical complexity appeared again for fourteen hundred years. How do civilisations forget what they know?
Outcome
The student can describe the mechanism and explain the significance of the fourteen-century gap.
Sub-units
Led by Hero of Alexandria Simulacrum
The question
Roman concrete has outlasted modern concrete. Roman aqueducts supplied a million people. Roman roads lasted two thousand years. After the Empire fell, the capacity to build these things was lost — not because the knowledge disappeared overnight, but because the social structures that required it were gone. Is great engineering inseparable from great inequality?
Outcome
The student can describe Roman engineering achievements and explain their social preconditions.
Sub-units
Led by Hero of Alexandria Simulacrum
The question
The ancient world had steam, computing, precision engineering, and concentrated wealth. Why no industrial revolution? Slave labour, metallurgy, incentives, markets — which hypothesis is strongest?
Outcome
The student can evaluate three hypotheses for why industrialisation did not occur in antiquity.
Sub-units
Led by Hero of Alexandria Simulacrum
The question
Are we judging the ancient world by standards it did not hold — asking why it failed to achieve goals it did not pursue? Perhaps it was trying to do something else entirely, and succeeded on its own terms.
Outcome
The student can explain the teleological fallacy in history of technology and take a position on ancient achievement.
Sub-units