In 2005 a group of MIT students conducted experiments using 30 cm square mirror tiles which is focused on a wooden ship at a range of 30 m. As a part of his grand legacy, many of his inventions and discoveries from over 2,000 years ago are still in use today. In 1975, Greek scientist Dr Ioannis Sakkas claimed to have used 60 mirrors held up by sailors to ignite a wooden ship from 160 feet (48 metres), while in 2002 a German experiment using 500 people with mirrors supposedly had similar success. In the 17th century Descartes dismissed the story as fantasy, but in 1747 George Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, claimed to have ignited a pine plank from 150 feet (45 metres), using an array of 128 mirrors. Today Archimedes’ Burning Mirror is generally considered to be a myth, but early European scientists had mixed feelings about the tale. Archimedes is a reimagined, thirtieth anniversary edition of Listening Vessels, a beloved and iconic Exploratorium exhibit.Douglas Hollis originally created Listening Vessels for the Berkeley Art Museum Matrix program in 1987 and gifted the work to the Exploratorium soon after. There is considerable debate to this day whether the burning mirrors. The mirrors gathered the rays of the sun and concentrated them into a laser-like beam, which ignited the Roman galleys from a distance, reducing them to ashes. One of the great stories from ancient history is of Archimedes setting fire to Roman ships during the Siege of Syracuse, 214212 BC, by using burning mirrors, mirrors that focused the rays of the sun and generated enough heat to set the attacking ships on fire. Accounts of his death relate that, as the Romans poured into Syracuse and sacked the city, a soldier broke into Archimedes’ house and ordered him to report to Marcellus, but that he was too preoccupied with a mathematical problem and refused to come until it was completed, whereupon the soldier ran him through.Īccording to the 12th-century Byzantine historian John Tzetzes, supposedly paraphrasing the Roman historian Dio Cassius (155–235 CE), it was a hexagonal mirror (probably of polished bronze), surrounded by smaller square mirrors, the whole assemblage fixed to an armature.

Archimedes mirror