Plato's Alarm Clock: And Other Amazing Ancient Inventions

We all like to think we are pretty smart. New medical advances seem to come along every day; space travel suddenly doesn’t seem so difficult; self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future . . . but if we were stranded on a desert island tomorrow, most of us wouldn’t know how to catch a fish or start a fire, let alone rebuild all that extraordinary technology we now rely on. The truth is that we’re not necessarily more clever than our ancestors, we just have an accumulation of centur...