Despite the fact that they are mentioned today for their contribution to the intellectual culture, the Greeks also had an attraction to technical things. So when they weren't looking at the stars and wanting to know how the universe works, or when they weren't killing each other, the Greeks were making inventions.

Astrolabe

The GPS of the Greeks from the 3rd century B.C. It was used by every astronomer and the Navy until the 18th century.

The leading Alexandrian mathematician Apollonius Pergaios is considered the inventor of the astrolabe as early as 220 BC, while both Ptolemy and Hipparchus Nicaeus (spherical astrolabe), the father of trigonometry, created their own versions.

Centuries later, the Arabs adopted the astrolabe from the Greeks, leveled it, and spread it throughout Europe as one of the essential instruments of navigation and astronomy.

Clock

Today, the measurement of time is taken for granted. However, there were times when you had to look at the sun to see what time it was. Unless, of course, you were Greek and discovered the water clock. Although archeologists debate whether it was a Greek or Egyptian invention, as one was found in the tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep I, the ancient Greeks experimented a lot with water clocks, also called hourglasses.

At least from 325 BC, they actually used them in daily life. Even the Athenian courts had them so that everyone would know when their speaking time was coming to an end.

With the Tower of the Winds (Clock of Kyrristos), the work of the mathematician and astronomer Andronikos of Kyrristis, which still stands in the Roman Market in Plaka, Athens, one could read the time even at night.

Lever

A lever is a rigid object that can rotate around an axis and in combination with it can multiply the force exerted on another object. This is how Archimedes defined the lever, so it is how physics still defines it today.

Archimedes was the first to explain the law of the lever and to formulate the balance of weights. Legend has it that, excited by the capabilities of the lever, he happily exclaimed: "Give me a point to stand on and I will move the earth!".

It was in 260 B.C. that the 27-year-old Archimedes saw some little kids on the beach playing, and he was inspired to interpret a law of engineering. After explaining the laws of levers, he used them, now scientifically, everywhere and took credit for the impressive and harmonious structures the ancient Greeks built. Without the levers of Syracuse, Greek architecture would be completely different.

Crane

If you were to walk around Athens in the 6th century BC, you would find a veritable construction site, with cranes towering over the buildings, speeding up construction time. The evidence for the use of hoisting machines on the temple stones even in 515 BC leaves no doubt as to how they got up there.

The Greeks already had pulleys and levers in hand, so they replaced ramps and heavy manual labor with the new invention that seemed like the next logical step. Within the next 200 years, Greek architecture would become more sophisticated as vertical movement allowed for smarter handling.

Where the aristocratic societies of Egypt recruited hordes of slaves to work the ramps, the Greek city-states required only a small and specialized team of technicians. Aristotle describes cranes, Archimedes also made innovative cranes that allowed him to launch entire ships with one hand (described by Heron).

Archimedes used such a crane (stone crane or "iron hand") to destroy Roman ships at the siege of Syracuse. A manual winch that allowed to unleash huge loads on enemy ships approaching the walls, sending them to the bottom.

Watermill

The watermill is something of a wheel, hard to figure out who discovered it. But while archeologists puzzle over whether the Egyptians, Persians, Indians, or Greeks were the originators of an invention that would change the world, there is good evidence that it was first used in the Greek world of Asia Minor around the 4th to 3rd centuries BC. It was a hydraulic grain mill, like the one still used today. The geographer Strabo tells us that it was first recruited by Mithridates VI Eupator, who was noted for his Greek studies.

The oldest one found is at Perachora near Corinth and dates from the 3rd century B.C. At the same time, traces of watermills in Greek territory exceed 20,000.

To the engineers of the Hellenistic world the water-mill was well known, as the Romans Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder testify, and the great Philon the Byzantine tells us in his "Pneumatics" that he had built a still more efficient mill by means of water.

Some historians place the birth of the watermill in the Greek colony of Byzantium in the first half of the 3rd century BC.

Catapult

Heron Alexandreus describes a series of Greek ballistic weapons in his "Velopika". The Greek catapult initially shot arrows at greater distances (crossbow) before eventually moving on to spears and stones. It was invented in Sicily around 399 BC when the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysios the Elder, commissioned Greek engineers to build a war machine for his campaign against Carthage.

And they had it ready in time for the sudden attack of the Carthaginians at Syracuse when the enemy fled from the arrows that struck them from everywhere. Even the king of Sparta, Archidamus, was speechless, literally stunned, at a demonstration of the catapult he had brought from Sicily.

As for the first great stone catapult in the history of mankind, this was the catapult of Philo, the work of the great engineer Diad of Pellaio, who was in the employ of Alexander the Great, and grandly called "the Siege"! It was the first military device that could fire missiles at great distances.

Diadis' teacher, the famous Polydeidus of Thessaly, was the military engineer who built for Philip the massive Ellipolis, the covered siege ram that gave Byzantium to the Macedonian king(341 BC).

Odometer

The odometer was a box containing Archimedes' endless screws (another colossal technological contribution) and gears mounted on a moving vehicle. The device transmitted the movement of the wheel to a disk and calibrated drums on its surface indicated the distance traveled.

The Greek Strabo and the Roman Pliny are impressed by the accuracy of the measurements made by Alexander the Great's pacemakers, Vaiton and Diogenes, during his campaign in the East. Historians now say, and want to explain how it was possible such an excellent accuracy that they had a deviation of 0.2%!

It is not impossible that the inventor of the versatile machine of Greek science, is Archimedes, as Heron Alexandreus suggests in "Peri dioptras" where he describes the odometer and its variant for water, the seawater meter.

However, the Antikythera Mechanism also included an odometer, so its use must have been common in Greece.

The Romans adopted it, as confirmed by the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius in 27-23 BC, and calculated with great accuracy the distances of the cities of their great empire.

Finally, the mechanical, technological and engineering contributions of the Greeks are not limited here. They made alarm clocks, computers, showers and plumbing, automatic doors, maps, arch bridges, lighthouses, locomotives, spiral staircases, central heating, vending machines, clocks, automation for theaters, machine tools, even robots!