Central High School - Snips and Cuts Yearbook (Charlotte, NC)

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Arrhimrhra skilled inventor of antiquity was born at Syracuse '-'HSM-' Sicily. The date of his birth IS supposed to have been in the year of 287, B. C. In his youth, he went to school at Alexandria and there, the Royal School of the Ptolemies, he finished his education under Conon. On his return to his native city, he devoted himself to geometrical investigations, and by energy and his wonder- ful inventive power, carried the science far beyond the limit it had then attained. Of his private life, we have a few disconnected notices. He was the devoted friend of Hiero, King of Syracuse, and he was always ready to exercise his ingenuity in the service of his admirer and patron. Popularly Archimedes is best known as the inventor of ingenious contrivances, though many of the stories handed down are probably fabulous. He devised for Hiero engines of war which terrified the Romans, and by these skillful contrivances, Syracuse held its own against Rome for three years. There is a story that Archimedes con- structed a burning mirror which set fire to the Roman ships when they were close to the walls. This story is hardly true, because neither of the three great writers mention it, namely, Polybus, Livy or Plutarch. He might have con- structed some mirrors to burn fiber, cloth, or some com- bustible matter at a short distance, but he could hardly have set fire to wooden boards. Among the most celebrated feats of his, are his dis- coveries in hydrostatics and hydraulics. The account us- ually given of one of these, is most remarkable. Hiero, it is said, had set him to discover, whether or not, the gold which he had given to an artist to work into a crown for 27 RCHIMEDES, the greatest mathematician and most . . . . ' . '

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0112155 nf 'III OFFICERS PRESIDENT-Jas. McCallum VICE-PRESIDENTQBGRI H. Siler SECRETARY-Lillian Shaw TREASURER-Junius Smith Memb Miss Jewel Fesperman Miss Della Fox Miss Estelle Glenn Miss Bessie Greene Miss Janet Hall Miss Frank Hoover Miss Ruby Hoover Miss Mary McCausland Miss Mabel Miller Miss Sara Moseley Miss Blanche Owens Miss Charlotte Rucker Miss Idabelle Shaw Miss Lillian Shaw Miss Helen Scholtz Miss Loraine Templeton Miss Marjorie Washburn Miss Sudie Wilson BFS Miss Louise Williams Miss Anna Wehner Otto Austin Fred Bitgood John Boyd Carey Dowd Albert Ezell Willie Etheridge Thomas Haughton Chalmers Jamison George Kidd Cyrus Long Callie Little Derr Mayberry Jas. McCallum J unius Smith Locke White Roy McKnight Ward Evans

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him, had been mixed with baser metal. Archimedes was puzzled, till one day, as he was stepping into a bath, he observed the water running over. It occurred to him that the excess of bulk occasioned by the introduction of alloy, could be measured by putting the crown and an equal weight of gold separately into a vessel filled with water, and observing the difference of the overflow. He was so over-joyed when this happy thought struck him, that he ran home without his clothes, shouting, Eureka! Eureka! I have found it, I have found it. His estimate of the capabilities of the lever is ex- pressed in the saying attributed to him, Give me a fulcrum on which to rest, and I will move the earth. The life of this philosopher ends with the capture of Syracuse by Marcellus, 212 B. C. In the general massacre which followed the fall of the city, Archimedes. while meditating upon a mathematical figure which he was draw- ing on the sand, was run through the body by a Roman soldier. No blame attaches to the Roman General, Mar- cellus, since he had given orders to his men to spare the house and person of the sage, and in the midst of his triumph, he lamented the death of so illustrious a persong he directed an honorable burial to be given him, and he befriended his surviving relatives. In accordance with the expressed wish of the philosopher, his tomb was marked by the figures of a sphere inscribed in cylinder-the dis- covery of the relation between the volume of a sphere its circumscribing cylinder, being regarded by him as his most valuable achievement. When Cicero was quaestor in Sicily, 75 B. C., he found the tomb of Archimedes over- grown with thorns and briars, near the Agrigentine gate. Thus, says Cicero, Would this most famous and once most learned city of Greece have remained a stranger to the tomb of one of its most ingenious citizens, had it not been discovered by a man of Arpinum. Roy B. MCKNIGHT, '10. 28