Philo of Byzantium (Ancient Greek: Φίλων ὁ Βυζάντιος, Phílōn ho Byzántios, c. 280 BC – c. 220 BC), also known as Philo Mechanicus (Latin for "Philo the Engineer"), was a Greek engineer, physicist and writer on mechanics, who lived during the latter half of the 3rd century BC. Although he was from Byzantium he lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt. He was probably younger than Ctesibius, though some place him a century earlier.
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⭐ Core Definition: Philo of Byzantium
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👉 Philo of Byzantium in the context of Polybolos
The polybolos (the name means "multi-thrower" in Greek) was an ancient Greek repeating ballista, reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria (a 3rd-century BC Greek engineer at the Rhodes arsenal,) and used in antiquity. The polybolos was not a crossbow since it used a torsion mechanism, drawing its power from twisted sinew-bundles. However the earlier and similar oxybeles employed a tension crosbow mechanism, before it was abandoned in favor of torsion.
Philo of Byzantium (c. 280 BC – c. 220 BC) encountered and described a weapon similar to the polybolos, a catapult that could fire again and again without a need for manual reloading. Philo left a detailed description of the gears that powered its chain drive (the oldest known application of such a mechanism) and that placed bolt after bolt into its firing slot.
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Philo of Byzantium in the context of Gimbal
A gimbal is a pivoted support that permits rotation of an object about an axis. A set of three gimbals, one mounted on the other with orthogonal pivot axes, may be used to allow an object mounted on the innermost gimbal to remain independent of the rotation of its support (e.g. vertical in the first animation). For example, on a ship, the gyroscopes, shipboard compasses, stoves, and even drink holders typically use gimbals to keep them upright with respect to the horizon despite the ship's pitching and rolling.
The gimbal suspension used for mounting compasses and the like is sometimes called a Cardan suspension after Italian mathematician and physicist Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) who described it in detail. However, Cardano did not invent the gimbal, nor did he claim to. The device has been known since antiquity, first described in the 3rd c. BC by Philo of Byzantium, although some modern authors support the view that it may not have a single identifiable inventor.