Author Description

Heron von Alexandria By W. Schmidt Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD) was an ancient Greek mathematician and engineer who lived in the Roman province of Egypt; He is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and his work is representative of the Greek scientific tradition. Hero published a famous description of a simple steam engine called an aeolipile. Among his most famous inventions were a windwheel, a cuckoo clock and a vending machine. Much of Hero's original writings and designs have been lost, having been burned by anti-pagan Christians sometime in the late 4th to 5th century but what remains of his work gives a fascinating insight into how advanced ancient Greco-Roman civilization was technically. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable prices. This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics, unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader organically to the art of bindery and book-making. We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes beyond the mere words of the text.