Archimedes formulates the principle of buoyancy

Date

c. 250 BCE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Sicily (Syracuse)

Era

Classical Antiquity

Significance

Archimedes of Syracuse, the foremost mathematician and engineer of antiquity, set out the law of buoyancy in his treatise On Floating Bodies (3rd century BCE): a body wholly or partly immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.

The famous (later) legend has him discovering it in his bath while testing the gold purity of King Hiero II's crown, crying 'Eureka.' Beyond hydrostatics, Archimedes derived the area of the circle and the relation between a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder, anticipated integral methods, and was credited with compound pulleys, the screw pump and war machines used in the Roman siege of Syracuse (where he was killed in 212 BCE). His rigorous mathematical physics and quantitative method made him a touchstone for later science, especially during the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.

Empires active in c. 250 BCE

• Maurya Empire
  322 BCE – 185 BCE
• Roman Republic
  509 BCE – 27 BCE
• Odrysian Kingdom
  480 BCE – 46 CE
• Seleucid Empire
  312 BCE – 63 BCE
• Ptolemaic Kingdom
  305 BCE – 30 BCE
• Kingdom of Kush
  1070 BCE – 350 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Euclid compiles the Elements at Alexandria
  c. 300 BCE
• Aristotle founds the Lyceum and systematises the sciences
  c. 335 BCE
• Eratosthenes measures the circumference of the Earth
  c. 240 BCE
• Wootz crucible steel developed in South India and Sri Lanka
  c. 300 BCE
• Construction of the Aqua Appia, Rome's first aqueduct
  312 BCE
• The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient analog computer
  c. 100 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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