Suppressed Roman Tech

to unknown


Some stories are just too damned cute to resist. Take this story reported by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History:
One day a goldsmith in Rome was allowed to show the Emperor Tiberius a dinner plate of a new metal. The plate was very light, and almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith told the Emperor that he had made the metal from plain clay. He also assured the Emperor that only he, himself, and the Gods knew how to produce this metal from clay. The Emperor became very interested, and as a financial expert he was also a little concerned. The Emperor felt immediately, however, that all his treasures of gold and silver would fall in value if people started to produce this bright metal of clay. Therefore, instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.
There you have it. The Romans discovered aluminium two thousand years ago, a substance which is extracted "from clay" (i.e. bauxite) and which has only been produced in commercial quantities in the past hundred or so years.

For most of the 19th century it was considered a precious metal so much more valuable than gold that Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of more famous and greater, Napoleon I) commissioned several important works for his recently restored imperial dynasty out of the stuff. He proudly wore a helmet made of aluminium and in 1856 when his son, the crown prince Eugene Louis Jean Joseph was born, he commissioned a baby rattle made out of aluminium (and combined with gold, diamonds, emeralds and coral). In 1860 he ordered that his battle standards, eagles atop of flagpoles, which had formerly been made of bronze, be replaced with aluminium gilded with gold (which had the added advantage of making them three time lighter) and in 1861 he had the state dinner held in honour of the visiting Siamese delegation to be served on aluminium plates while ordinary dignitaries had to be content to eat off gold. Basically, the Emperor was really very positive about aluminium.

So contrast the vision of this enlightened emperor with the stodginess and paranoia of old Tiberius. Imagine how the history of carbonated soft drinks could be been so very very different if the Romans imperator hadn't sought to suppress this wondrous stuff. A cursory glance at Google will tell you that these two stories go hand in hand and are repeated verbatim on virtually every website that has an interest in aluminium.

So I was quite interested to learn while searching for an original source of Pliny's quote, that this was actually just a myth and that Pliny had said no such thing*. Not only that, it was a carefully constructed myth that was promulgated by Napoleon's very own aluminium guy, Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, the man founded the world's first commercial aluminium process with the genreous support of the Emperor. The purpose of this tale was to explicitly contrast the virtues the two emperors. Tiberius has never been regarded highly by posterity and he really was crotchety and paranoid. Napoleon III, on the other hand, was to be seen as a modern and enlightened monarch, one especially suited to lead France into a glorious future age**. Deville's initial marketing of aluminium was as "silver from clay".

However, what Pliny was actually talking about was a completely different wonder material: flexible glass.
The tale is told that, during the reign of Tiberius, a glass was devised, so compounded as to be flexible, and that the workshop of the inventor was utterly destroyed, lest there should be a decline in the value of copper, silver, and gold.

--- Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 36, para. 195
No mention of a goldsmith, no mention of a metal "almost as bright as silver", this was all Deville's work. The material Pliny discussed was wondrous in itself but it certainly wasn't aluminium. The story is laid out more explicitly by Petronius in The Satyricon:
"But there was an artisan, once upon a time, who made a glass vial that couldn't be broken. On that account he was admitted to Caesar with his gift; then he dashed it upon the floor, when Caesar handed it back to him. The Emperor was greatly startled, but the artisan picked the vial up off the pavement, and it was dented, just like a brass bowl would have been! He took a little hammer out of his tunic and beat out the dent without any trouble. When he had done that, he thought he would soon be in Jupiter's heaven, and more especially when Caesar said to him, 'Is there anyone else who knows how to make this malleable glass? Think now!' And when he denied that anyone else knew the secret, Caesar ordered his head chopped off, because if this should get out, we would think no more of gold than we would of dirt."

---The Satyricon, by Petronius, Volume 2 Chapter 51
So what was this remarkable material? Why was it really suppressed? Was it alien technology?

* This little exercise was for me interesting illustration of the relative strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia which, being the closest thing the web has to an authoritative voice, probably has done the most to spread this myth (mainly through those Wikipedia rip-off sites -- are those things really legal?). But at the same time, it was also the source of the link to the article that debunked it.

** Karl Marx, incidentally, wrote of the two Napoleons: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." --- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

Oh, how true.

UPDATE: Language Hat provides a little further on that famous Marx quote:
Regarding the Marx line, Alexander Cockburn has this to say: "In his 1973 NLR/Penguin edition, David Fernbach claimed that it is doubtful whether Hegel ever said any such thing. On the other hand, Engels had recently written Marx a letter in which he observed, 'It really seems as if old Hegel in his grave were acting as World Spirit and directing history, ordaining most conscientiously that it should all be unrolled twice over, once as a great tragedy and once as a wretched farce.' Marx obviously thought it was a bit more dignified to cite Hegel than to say 'Fred Engels was saying to me only the other day..."