Fun Fact of the Day: Sex-and-gore-crazed autocrat Caligula had two ships, the Nemi ships, built in the 1st century AD that had tech on them not rediscovered until the Middle Ages, and some that was originally believed to date to the 18th century (when discovered in the 1929). That’d be like finding a mechanical computer dating to the Romans on par with IBM’s ENIAC from 1945, or finding out the fax machine was invented by the Romans rather than in 1843.
That tech included, but wasn’t limited to:
- nails made of electroplated copper,
- hot and cold running water using a valve pump system,
- a folding timber stock anchor that closely matched the design of the Admiralty pattern anchor re-invented in 1841
- hand-operated bilge pumps that worked like a modern bucket dredge (the oldest example of this type of bilge pump ever found)… and the pumps were operated by what may have been the oldest crank handles yet discovered!
- platforms mounted on caged bronze balls that use thrust ball bearings. They’d previously been thought to have been first theorized and drawn by Leonardo da Vinci but developed much later.
The ships were dredged up in 1929 and reconstructed and then destroyed during WW2 😭. Bits do remain, however, and that’s where we’ve learned all of this cool shit. 🤘
