Philo of Byzantium

Philo of Byzantium, also called Philo Mechanicus, was a Greek engineer, physicist and writer on mechanics who lived in the latter half of the 3rd century BC. Although he came from Byzantium he spent most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt. His large work, the Syntaxis or System of Mechanics, had sections on leverage, harbour construction, siege engine construction, pneumatics, automatons, siegecraft and coded correspondence; the military sections on missiles and sieges survive in Greek, and the pneumatics survive through a Latin translation of an Arabic translation. His writings describe an early chain drive in a repeating crossbow, an eight-sided inkwell hung in concentric rings that is the first described gimbal, the earliest known escapement in a washstand mechanism, a thermoscope, and possibly the first water mill. In mathematics he attacked the problem of doubling the cube, which arose from doubling a catapult's projectile weight, and the Philo line is named for his construction.