Пхилон Византий: ежелгі грек инженері мен ғылымы

3rd century BCE Greek engineer, physicist and writer

Philo of Byzantium (, 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.

According to recent research, a section of Philo's Pneumatics which so far has been regarded as a later Arabic interpolation, includes the first description of a water mill in history, placing the invention of the water mill in the mid third century BC by the Greeks. Philo's works also contain the oldest known application of a chain drive in a repeating crossbow. Two flat linked chains were connected to a windlass, which by winding back and forth would automatically fire the machine's arrows until its magazine was empty. Philo also was the first to describe a gimbal: an eight sided ink pot that could be turned any way without spilling and expose the ink on top. This was done by the suspension of the inkwell at the centre, which was mounted on a series of concentric metal rings which remained stationary no matter which way the pot turns. In his Pneumatics (chapter 31) Philo describes an escapement mechanism, the earliest known, as part of a washstand. He is also credited with the construction of the first thermoscope (or Philo thermometer), an early version of the thermometer.

In mathematics, Philo tackled the problem of doubling the cube. The doubling of the cube was necessitated by the following problem: given a catapult, construct a second catapult that is capable of firing a projectile twice as heavy as the projectile of the first catapult. His solution was to find the point of intersection of a rectangular hyperbola and a circle, a solution that is similar to the solution given by Hero of Alexandria several centuries later.

A treatise titled "Seven Wonders of the World" (Περὶ τῶν Ἑπτὰ Θεαμάτων, Perì tō̂n Heptà Theamátōn) is sometimes attributed to this Philo but more probably belongs to a different Philo of Byzantium, distinguished as Philo the Paradoxographer, who lived in a much later date, probably the 4th–5th century AD. It is printed in R. Hercher's edition of Aelian (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1858); an English translation by Jean Blackwood is included as an appendix in The Seven Wonders of the World by Michael Ashley (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1980).