With a friend I visited the Huntington Library today where there is a display of a work by the science genius Archimedes called Method a single volume written on vellum and the only original copy in existence. Archimedes wrote it in 300 BC. Later in 1200 AD the manuscript was washed off by a monk who used the book vellum to write a prayer book on it. The work by Archimedes was only faintly still there. For centuries, this prayer book was used in churches, then sometimes lost, glued together in the 19th C, written over again in the 20th C to design a forgery of supposed middle ages work, and generally mistreated. In middle 19the C and early 20th C there was a realization that this prayer book was really an Archimedes manuscript. Finally this blobby pile of vellum turned up in an auction house in 1998 where it sold for $2 million. With 21st C processes the genius of the Archimedes written work is painstakingly picked out and found through the mess by a very talented woman conservator who has made it available to us today.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 02:58:15 +0000
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