Roman Dodecahedra .
Andre Willers
18 Nov 2014
Synopsis :
An ancient safety lamp and heater . Only expensive metal
ones partially survived . Known as Roman dodecahedrons .
Discussion :
1.Any shack dweller or army tent brat would instantly
recognize them .
Fire is a deadly danger in places like army camps .
So , those who could afford it had lamps and heaters mounted
in gimbals inside safety holders .
See Appendix B .
The gimbal tech was known from 200 BCE onwards .
2.Worked metal was impossibly expensive , but hardwood was
easy to carve .
So the actual mountings of the gimbal would have been wood .
This would have perished or any remains misclassified .
Fancy ones would have stability mountings made of metal .
Officer stuff .
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2.1 Like this one : the large holes indicated use as a lamp
. Smaller holes would indicate heaters .
Note most of the remnants were found in colder latitudes .
2.2 A fancy officer’s heater . Will keep gloved hands nice
and toasty at -10 degrees . Note that it is not a dodecahedron . A doting
father’s status gift .
3.Fuel supply .
We would use some machine with a tank . A Roman didn’t think
like that .
He thought “slave” .
So some shivering slave had to stand by all night to put in oil into the
lamp or heater .
4. The knobs weren’t only for stability . They also enabled
sharing heat while wearing mittens . The knobs functioned as holders (exactly
the same as in your kitchen pots)
At least 3-4 troopies could safely warm their hands on those
bitterly cold nights .
5.The stability and gimbal mounting meant that it could be
wrapped in a skin or blanket as a bed-warmer .
Especially important for arthritic , elderly commanders on
the Rhine . Something the Sagas never address .
6.Why did so few survive ?
Because most of them were made entirely of wood .
Some ceramics , too . But wood perishes , ceramic gets
broken into shards and dispersed once the wood bracements are gone .
And misclassification . There are probably hundreds of
remains in the basements of the big Museums .
Only fancy , rich , status items survived in some sort of
shape .
7.Why no technological copying by the Goths ?
They had the metalworking and woodworking skills .
The problem was fuel . No olive oil or many slaves to feed
the contraption .
Remember , the fuel container inside the gimbal had to be
small and energy intensive .
They only had charcoal , so braziers were substituted .
“Warm face, warm hands, warm feet. Oh, wouldn't it be
loverly?” My Fair Lady
Toastily yours
Andre .
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Appendix A
Roman Dodecahedra
Dozens of hollow, bronze dodecahedra survive from Roman times, the
second to fourth century. They have been found in Great Britain, Belgium,
Germany, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Austria, switzerland, and Hungary.
Ranging from 4 to 11 cm, they are embellished with spheroids at each vertex and
circular holes of various diameters in each face. The articles by
Artmann, Emmer, and Malkevitch (listed in the references) describe them further. The 10
cm example illustrated at right is scanned from the article by
Malkevitch. Often there are concentric circles scored around the
openings, as in the 8 cm example below, from the article by Emmer.
he function of these
dodecahedra has not been determined. (So it is not clear that I should
list them here under the category art.) Speculation includes: candle stands,
flower stands, staff or scepter decorations, surveying instruments, leveling
instrument, finger ring-size gauges, dice, a toy to throw and catch on a stick,
and geometric sculpture. No one knows.
Artmann also reports one
Roman icosahedron, illustrated at left. It is also hollow, bronze, and
about 8 cm in diameter. This only deepens the mystery as to the function
of these objects.
Interestingly, it was
put away in a museum's basement storage, misclassified as a "dodecahedron"
for forty years before someone noticed it was not a dodecahedron. That
illustrates nicely how people see things differently depending on their
background knowledge.
If you read German, read this nice
survey article by Bernhard A. Greiner.
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Appendix B
http://www.romansystemsengineering.com/news/40/The%20Gimbal.html
The Gimbal
In
a conversation with a friend, he pointed out that the Gimbal would be the
best practical/automated embodiment to achieve arbitary Euler angle rotation
(theta, phi, Xi) of an object around its center of mass. I told him quite
simply, you are good, but a guy like Archimedes would no doubt have
conceived of such a leap of generalization. Of course we first did quick
check first at Wikipedia about the inventor of the Gimbal.
To
no surprise to us, the Gimbal was first described by the Greek inventor Philo of
Byzantium (280-220BC). He died only 8 years after Archimedes.
Philo
described an 8 sided ink pot with holes, which can be turned so that while any
face is on top, a pen can be dipped in ink, yet the ink never runs out through
the holes on the other sides. This was done by the suspension of the ink
well in the center, which was mounted on a series of concentric rings which
remained stationary no matter where the pot is turned.
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