Archimedes's iron hand or claw - a new interpretation of an old mystery

Abstract

When Roman forces attempted to storm Syracuse by land and sea in B.C.E.213, they were repelled by an array of ingenious machines, including one thatpowered Archimedes’s iron ‘‘hand’’ or ‘‘claw’’ – a device said to have stoodRoman warships upon their sterns by raising their prows out of the water.In the absence of any surviving technical description of this device, mostattempts at an explanation have been based on translations of the only threesurviving classical works that briefly mention the claw. However, we find thesetranslations to be extremely misleading in places. In this paper, we (1) brieflyreview existing interpretations of the claw, (2) demonstrate quantitatively thatthey are very far from practical, (3) propose a new but simpler explanationby which 75-t vessels could be raised with great ease and speed, and (4)demonstrate that the original Greek and Latin texts are more consistent withthis new scenario than existing ones.