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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear Faldage: Half the Greek population did too, and many of them. But I was talking about the age of mythology, when Procrustes was redimensioning travellers.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Bill - you may have seen this already, but AHD gives the etymology of this word as:
from Latin Procrustes, from Greek Prokrousts,from prokrouein, hammer out, to stretch out : pro-, forth; see pro–2 + krouein, to beat.
So, as odd as it sounds, it appears that Proctrustes method may have been more like flattening and rolling out dough, or even pounding out a soft metal, rather than stretching with a screw-driven rack.
On the whole Archimedes question, I recently read One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (I swear, I do have a life) by the vowel-deprived Witold Rybczynski. It's a short, interesting book about the provenance of these two items, which the author views as the most important tools to have appeared in the last millennium. I guess there were screw-threaded devices before then, like Archimedes' water-lifter, and others for pressing olive oil, but they don't go back much further than Archimedes. Which bears out Bill's point that there was no screwing around during the actual® life time of the mythical Procrustes.
p.s. - in thinking about it - you don't need a screw for a rack, just a wheel, around which a cable or chain could be tightened, and some sort of peg or ratchet to hold the wheel in position. Time to stop designing torture devices in my head now...
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear :Hyla: Nice informative post, thank you. I didn't know where to look for etymology of Procrustes' name.
But flesh not being malleable, a tensioning device would be needed. There is a primitive way called a "Spanish windlass", an English mockery of Spanish seamanship, that involved tying a loop around two fixed points, and the passing a bar between them and twisting the ropes to tighten them.
You also reminded me of the legend of Pythagorus' getting rich by achieving a corner on olive oil presses. But Procrustes belonged to the much earlier age of mythology.
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