Vitruvius

Yes, [laughs] quite so.

I was presented with a priceless Roman ring of office, which we had found on the dead man's finger, and a magnificent copy of Vitruvius' De Architectura.

On the flyleaf, in Holmes' handwriting, was the inscription, "One never knows what bit of useless tittle-tattle may save a man's life," with the chapter on the hypocaust was underlined.

Gotcha that time.

[laughs] Quite so.

I was presented with a priceless Roman ring of office, which we had found on the dead man's finger, and a magnificent copy of Vitruvius' De Architectura.

On the flyleaf, in Holmes' handwriting, was the inscription, "One never knows what bit of useless tittle-tattle may save a man's life," the chapter on the hypocaust was underlined.

Got you that time.

Their list is a long one.

Among them were Porgio Bracciolini, who discovered the manuscript of the Institutions of Quintilian and the writings of Vitruvius.

Poliziano, the first poet of the 15th century and the translator of the works of Hippocrates and Galen.

Pontanas, whose Destellis and Urania were much admired by Italian scholars.

By far the most famous anecdote about Archimedes involves him jumping out of a bath and running into the street naked, shouting, Eureka! after making a discovery.

The earliest version of the tale is found in De Architectura, a ten-volume book on architecture by Vitruvius.

a Roman architect and engineer who lived during the 1st century BC.

In Vitruvius' account, King Hiero wanted to make an offering to the gods at a temple and commissioned an artisan to make what is usually understood as a gold votive crown, but is more likely to have resembled a wreath.

The king measured out a quantity of gold and gave it to the craftsman, who duly presented an item of exquisite beauty to the king.

However, after hearing rumors that the artisan had defrauded the king by substituting part of the gold for an equal mass of silver, Hiero decided to investigate and asked Archimedes to find a way to test the object's purity without breaking it.

Next, he placed the king's wreath into the water and found that it displaced more water than the lump of pure gold.

Archimedes was therefore able to tell that the volume of the wreath was greater than that of the pure gold, and accordingly the metals within were less dense, proving that the wreath was indeed made from a mixture of gold and silver, not pure gold.

One of them is pretty ancient.

It came from Vitruvius and it's Venustas Utilitas Fermitas.

And a better description of architecture I don't think has ever been invented.

Come many centuries later, we get to Louis Sullivan and his famous maxim was form follows function.

The more memorable version involves a bathtub.

According to a story recorded by the Roman writer Vitruvius centuries later, the king of Syracuse suspected that a goldsmith had cheated him while making a ceremonial crown.

Archimedes had to figure out whether the crown was pure gold without melting it down.

Then, while getting into a bath one day, he noticed that the water level rose.

The historical accuracy of the naked sprint is impossible to verify, but I certainly hope it happened.

Because there's something wonderfully reassuring about the possibility that one of history's greatest mathematicians celebrated a scientific breakthrough exactly like a person who had just won the lottery.

The surviving version of the crown story comes from Vitruvius, and he was writing roughly two centuries after Archimedes.

So it's not clear if this happened or this is one of those hand-me-down telephone stories.