The Original Bath of Maria
One other Hellenistic [i.e., ancient Greek] inventor had worked directly with steam, but she showed greater staying power in the long age of alchemy that covered the wake of Hero and Lucretius. She was a chemist called Maria the Jewess. Maria has left fewer personal tracks than any of the others we have mentioned, despite her greater influence. Most of what we know about her comes from an Egyptian alchemist named Zosimos, who wrote in the later days of the Roman Empire, five hundred years after Maria lived. Among other things, Zosimos talks about her invention of a device called the kerotakis
The kerotakis was one of many forms of stills, boilers, and reflux condensers that Maria invented. In it, she boiled mercury or sulfur in a lower container and used its condensing vapor to heat copper or lead in a pan above. It was a high-temperature version of the double boiler.
The familiar double boiler is an extremely clever contrivance. We cook food in an upper pan that is nested in a lower pan of boiling water. The food stays at the same temperature as the steam condensing below it–at 100°C. (The only reference to Maria that lingers in the modern world is the French word for a double boiler–bain-marie, literally "Maria's bath.")
[John H. Lienhard, How Invention Begins : Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 44–45.]
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on Monday, 23 April 2007 at 07.59
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you didn't know about maria the jewess? the first famous female chemist? (it would be centuries before Mme Curie came along as the second famous female chemist)
she's a fave of mine.
speaking of heating devices, one of these days (prolly when you're back from the eternal city) I'll tell you about my Junkers calorimeter, a teaching instrument which will become a gen-U-ine antique in two years.
bon voyage!