The UnXplained

An ancient nuclear weapon

that turned a city to glass.

A pillar made of iron,

impervious to decay.

And a mystical chemical elixir that turns lead

into gold.

Today, many of us believe that we're living

in a civilization that has reached the height

of technological innovation.

But all around us,

there are clues that an ancient world

once existed which possessed

extraordinary feats of engineering,

chemistry and mechanical marvels.

What innovations can be found in the legends of the past?

And who were the masterminds behind what we might call

impossible ancient inventions?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

This Mediterranean stronghold was once the most beautiful

and powerful city of ancient Greece.

But in 213 BC,

the Romans wanted to take it for themselves

and began a siege,

deploying a formidable force

of over 60 warships

equipped with the latest devices

to support their assault.

Yet they would soon discover that overpowering the defenses

at Syracuse would be a terrifying task

as they faced the ingenious inventions

of the great mathematician Archimedes.

Archimedes is a huge figure in intellectual history,

and he was a-a scientist,

he was an inventor, he was a philosopher.

He did many, many important inventions,

such as the Archimedes' screw,

which was basically a screw

to draw water up from the waterways so you can irrigate.

And he was located in Syracuse,

so when the Romans decided to lay siege to the city,

we have Archimedes using his considerable intellect

and his considerable practical skills

and technological skills to try to help save his home city.

One of the things he did is he built numerous kinds

of catapults and ballistae--

things that threw bolts and rocks.

And so they could never even get close

with their big siege towers.

He also used his knowledge of levers.

You can, say, lever out a huge rock

and drop it right on a ship.

Archimedes was a master of tools of war.

He could try the Claw of Archimedes,

and it was an iron claw like my hand.

And it reached out from shore,

grabbed the ship,

pressed it down, and caused it to sink.

But one of the things that he may have had

was the idea of the death ray.

In addition to the monstrous claw,

the great thinker invented a devastating new technology

that could attack ships

before they reached the island fortress.

It's a weapon shrouded in mystery and myth

that has come to be known as Archimedes' death ray.

Archimedes' death ray

had some beam of magic electrical

or-or energy beam that could reach out

and sink these Roman ships,

set them on fire from a distance.

Of course, fire is terrifying at sea

because the ship's gonna burn to the waterline.

So you're either gonna burn to death or you're gonna drown.

Neither one of those are happy conclusions.

So, this idea that ancient Greeks

in the third century BC

had some beam

that could reach out and sink these Roman ships,

set them on fire from a distance,

it just sparks the imagination.

The ingenious inventions of Archimedes

repelled Rome's nautical assault for over a year.

Eventually, in 212 BC, the Roman army

was able to breach the wall of the outer city

and take control of Syracuse.

And at 78 years old,

Archimedes was mistakenly killed by a Roman soldier.

Today, more than 2,200 years

after the siege of Syracuse,

the legend of Archimedes' death ray

continues to mystify us.

One of the fun things about thinking about ancient devices,

there are these ones that have been a mystery.

We think of them as impossible things

for ancients to have done.

And certainly, for most of human history,

it's really fundamentally hard

to get a ray beam to be really tight and energetic.

But we really don't know how they did it.

How did Archimedes invent

such an advanced weapon technology

thousands of years ago?

Well, some experts theorize that he devised

a surprisingly simple solution.

He harnessed the power of the Sun.

On a crisp autumn day, students from

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

align dozens of mirrors throughout the campus

and wait for the Sun to shine.

One of the most interesting experiments

was with Archimedes' death ray.

They built a-a model of a piece of the ship,

and they took about 40 mirrors,

and they held them up to the Sun.

When they got them all focused

and got ten minutes of good sun,

they were able to catch wood planking--

like just chunks of wood-- on fire.

So it does suggest that the Archimedes' death ray

is not a crazy idea.

You know, we don't really know what happened,

but this shows that something sure could've happened

that made the Archimedes' death ray

a totally interesting and plausible story.

We have to commend them for trying

to duplicate the conditions

that existed 2,000 years ago in building this device.

They were able to set a small fire,

but a fire that could knock out a fleet of enemy ships

probably was not done.

The distances are enormous.

So, it's possible to focus the light,

it's possible to create a fire,

but not over the distances involved and the number

of fleets of ships that are coming at you.

The truth behind Archimedes' death ray

is still shrouded in mystery.

Archeological evidence of the invention

has never been found,

and there are no surviving records from Archimedes himself.

In fact, the first known mention of Archimedes using mirrors

appears 700 years after the siege of Syracuse

in a work by Greek mathematician Anthemius of Tralles.

It was pure speculation that he had used some sort of

large mirror or focusing device.

But this idea of a directed energy beam is a powerful idea.

And then that carries through to the technologies of today.

Today, we use lasers.

We use them to shoot missiles out of the sky from our ships.

Archimedes was talking about death rays,

something that we wouldn't see for a few more thousand years.

We're talking about laser beams.

Laser beams that have enough power

to literally fry the enemy,

to punch a hole in the hull of enemy ships.

Archimedes was onto something, a new form of warfare,

but the state of the matter is, we simply don't know.

Whether Archimedes' death ray existed or not,

the details of this mythic invention suggests...

...that even our most advanced modern technology

may have started in the ancient world.

We like to think that science is building steadily

on earlier achievements.

That it's sort of a steady linear progression

of adding knowledge and technology.

What we often find is that civilizations

go in-in spurts, and-and-and they can disappear,

and whole knowledge can disappear.

Civilizations can get invaded.

Libraries can catch on fire.

And so, a lot of our technological process

seem to be, every once in a while, reinventing the wheel.

Could some of today's

most cutting-edge advancements actually be

reinventions of ancient technology?

Perhaps further evidence may be found by examining

an ancient Hindu text

said to describe an atomic weapon.

In the final days of World War II--

the deadliest conflict in human history--

the United States sends a B-29 bomber

over the Japanese city of Hiroshima

and drop an atomic bomb.

Three days later, another A-bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.

Having witnessed the devastating power

of atomic weaponry firsthand,

Emperor Hirohito announces Japan's total surrender,

and the Second World War comes to an end.

Before then, warfare was always done on a small scale.

It was settled right there on the battlefield.

But with nuclear weapons,

you could vaporize the enemy.

Never in the history of Homo sapiens,

until the development of the atomic bomb,

have we had the power of total annihilation.

According to most historians,

the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

mark the first and only time

that atomic bombs were deployed in warfare.

But is it possible that this technology