Hero, or Heron, of Alexandria, on the other hand, had the astonishing bad taste to be born around 10 CE, which made his inventions so far ahead of their time that they could be of little practical use and, in time, were forgotten. If he had been born in, say, 1710, his engineering prowess and incredible creativity might have made him the richest person in the world. As it is, he'll just have to settle for the posthumous reputation of being the greatest inventor in human history. Seriously, unless you invent a warp drive tomorrow, there's no way you're catching up to Hero.
I used to have a really fun book called Ancient Inventions, mentioned at the bottom of the article. It was full of amazing stuff. Unfortunately, I lent it to a classmate in grad school and he kept it. I should look into replacing my copy. And you know, I learned a lot about ancient and mediaeval science from one of my professors at school who specialised in that (he also taught a great class on mediaeval cosmology), but a lot of those sorts of inventions never made it into class. (I take a certain amount of pride in having survived three of his classes--he assigned insane numbers of readings and was a very difficult person to get along with, but I somehow made it. But I was terrified of having him on my committee, and that was one reason I never managed to finish my graduate degree in ancient and mediaeval history, due to anxiety over an oral defence.)
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