Instructor Spotlight: Max Peers

What can inventions and innovations—both ancient and modern—teach us about history?

Some people may conjure an image of the lone genius inventor, but technological innovation was and is much more about a social process. By studying ancient engineering and technology in context, we can learn about how people worked together, communicated, failed, problem-solved, and succeeded, to ultimately create the marvels that still impress us today. When seen in isolation, the Great Pyramids of Giza can invoke mystery (and maybe aliens?), but there are a whole series of earlier pyramids that show how Egyptian architects developed the pyramidal form out of preexisting funerary structures, monumentalized them, and messed up several times along the way (including a pyramid described as “bent”). From this view, the Pyramids of Giza are the culmination of a process of innovation in which builders identified and then solved for problems in subsequent iterations. To these ends, I have my students work together in weekly hands-on activities and complete a final project in which they form groups to build working models of ancient machines.

What is your favorite invention you are exploring this semester and why?

As someone who studies Roman architecture and construction processes, I have a soft spot for hydraulic concrete, which revolutionized the building industry of the city of Rome and the empire as a whole. It connects to a whole host of other techniques and technologies and has left us with famous buildings like the Colosseum and the Pantheon. It also supported the construction of the aqueducts that Romans built throughout Italy and the empire, which used a series of surveying instruments that allowed them to construct channels with a gradient of about 0.013%—less than 9 inches per mile. Here too, we have stories of the mistakes made, like a famous example where an architect had to be called back to the project because workers had missed each other carving a tunnel through a mountain from opposite ends for an aqueduct.

What is a modern invention with ancient origins that people would be surprised by?

The modern odometer, which measures the distance driven by your car, has a Roman antecedent. It was a cart with a system of toothed gears that would drop a marble into a bowl after the operator had gone a mile (or some other predetermined distance). The Roman author Vitruvius describes the machine in great detail, down to the number of teeth each gear should have. Using their hodometers, the Romans laid out their road network across much of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, with milestones that told travelers how many miles to various other cities near and far.