They Did It With Mirrors

Did Archimedes really produce a death ray 2,200 years ago? According to Greek and Roman historians, he set Roman warships afire with a polished mirror that focused the sun's rays from afar during the siege of Syracuse. Last year the Discovery Channel program "MythBusters" declared the story a myth after failing to reproduce the feat.

But David Wallace, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posed it as an offbeat class project in product development. Setting up 127 cheap on-square-foot mirrors 100 feet from a wooden mock-up of the side of a ship, with just 10 minutes of clear sky the "ship" burst into flames.

"We're not trying to assess whether Archimedes really did it or not," Dr. Wallace said. Instead, his students have shown that "It's at least possible."

From an article appearing in The New York Times, October 18, 2005.