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Tut and Nero: Wild on Wheels

– Good afternoon. I’m Emily Auerbach, welcome to today’s talk, which is part of Eloquence and Eminence Emeritus Faculty Lectures. This is a series that I started 25 years ago, to feature retired UW-Madison faculty known for their teaching excellence, and their scholarly expertise. Today’s speaker, Bela Sandor, is a Professor Emeritus from UW in Engineering Physics. Bela Sandor received his PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois in 1968, and later that year joined the UW-Madison faculty in the College of Engineering.

In 1985 he was named the First Guest Professor of Osaka University, and a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In these capacities, he has lectured widely in Japanese universities, industries and
government institutions. His research areas were in fracture, and non-destructive evaluation and life prediction of materials used in automotive, aerospace, and electronics areas. His numerous papers and books are on the subjects of statics, dynamics, strength of materials, and fundamentals of cyclic stress and strain. In the last two decades, Professor Sandor has done
extensive research of all kinds on ancient chariots, focusing on their inner dynamics, and on the subtle aspects of high performance racing vehicles. He has published seminal papers on these topics, in internationally leading journals including the Oxford Journal of Archeology, and the Journal of Roman Archeology. His insights into how ancients invented and designed superb machines, led to his principle technical advisory role, and contributions to a PBS Nova documentary, called “Building Pharaoh’s Chariot.” Please welcome for a talk today called “Tut and Nero: Wild on Wheels,” Professor Bela Sandor. (applauding)

– Thank you, now that I’m really wired up, (audience chuckling) I will take you to the ancient world, and show you some tricky, complex situations, of racing, in contrast with modern racing, like the Indy 500. On this journey, we will go to many countries, in four continents, and over 5000 years. So obviously, I’m in a situation where I could get confused. (chuckling) And uh, bear with me, I will try to dig myself out.

Imagine yourself, as a top driver at the Indy 500, but not this year, but in some future year. So you have to use your imagination. And what would be done, to enhance the excitement, of the Indy 500 over what has been done, in the last, about 103 years or so? Well, I would suggest, that you could take a page from, Byzantium, go back to about 500 A.D., and watch what they were doing. It was called diversium. It’s a Latin word, and it is a fantastic, spectacular, sporting development. What it means, is that you race in the morning, you were tops, so you may win your heat, after that, you and the number two racer, and also the three and four, perhaps, go and take a bath, and have lunch, come back in the afternoon, and what do you do next? You change horses with your closest enemy. (audience murmuring) Okay?

This is the nature of diversium. Well, you change horses and pit crews, as well. You do not change everything. You do not change the chassis of your vehicle, and its wheels. Now just imagine this. You change horses and pit crews, and maybe veterinarians you know, and whatever else goes, with the team. But you do not change everything. You keep the chassis, and the wheels. Now you might ask reasonably, why? Why not change everything? Well my talk will be on that topic. But slowly developing, you may have to put two and two together, to understand what were those important things about the chassis and the wheels, that you may want to keep them, but, horses are important of course.

But, there are other things as well. So let’s see where we go. Here is the basic description of what I just mentioned, okay?

Diversium, and it was probably, the name of the game over some hundreds of years, it’s not totally known, exactly when and where it started, but I have a good idea. It was probably by a fantastic driver called Porphyrius, who raced in some more than 40 cities in the ancient empire.And he was a great winner, and he was such a winner, that, very unusually, while he was still alive, they gave him seven statues. Normally a single statue would be awarded to somebody after retirement. He got his first one when he was I think maybe 13 or 14. So he was quite a driver, and (chuckles), and I think he may have said that, you know, to prove his skill, to his opponents, and say okay, I’ll change my horses and my team, you know, you can use them, I’ll still beat you. And most of the time he still did.

So that kind of proves a point. So this is a kind of a view of the Grand Palace of Constantinople. Okay, so here’s the Hippodrome where the races were held, and this is what the Hippodrome looks like in plan view. This by the way is entirely typical of the ancient world, Roman, and Byzantium type, Byzantine type of racing circuits. This is about 240 meters long, this center spine, you notice that it’s not exactly centered, it’s not symmetric, this is typical. Everything here in this picture is typical of ancient Roman and Byzantine racing, all over the empire, for over maybe 2000 years, okay? This is the kind of thing that was going on. Sometimes in smaller places, but anyway, here is the starting gates. You see that they are kind of on a curve, on a circular arc, which means that each one has an equal chance of reaching this first point, entering the big chute.

These people were incredibly fair and well organized. They were totally fair to everybody. Like the gates would open all at once, you know, with a mechanism, pow! Open the gates, and the horses are ready to shoot out. So, they come to this corner, and this is the first exciting, no, this is the first really exciting place, because people are crowding into a narrow couple of lanes, and they’re trying to beat each other. The next, every time, there’s seven circuits by the way, typically, seven complete circuits, and each corner is, is a danger situation. People loved it.

So, now ancient and modern racing on oval surface was quite different in that sense. This view, like my hands, would represent a modern, typical race track, on a closed circuit, you know like foot races, and bike races, and speed skating, and the Indy 500. It’s a fat oval. And that’s how you go around, counter-clockwise. Now you may want to ask why on Earth counter-clockwise? Well, because the Romans did this, and the Romans did it because the Greeks did it, you know and so on. (chuckling)

Now in contrast, ancient racing was like this flat view, okay? It was what I call a paper clip track. Very narrow, very long, and incredibly different at the corners. Well, what else. You see the sky box of the emperor here. There are some baths here, and so on, you know between the races of the diversium.
Some of these races were going on all day long, and sometimes virtually every other day. I mean this was the only entertainment, instead of television. Now, we come to the Indy 500, you may not be able to read this but, this is Juan Pablo Montoya, you can see his face and recognize it, and uh, this is Team Penske, this is from 2014. He was one of the world’s best race car drivers. And notice one little thing. He is leaning into the curve, isn’t he? He’s turning left so, just like you might do, just watch yourself, how you do some fast corners, you know, with your car, you lean into it ever so lightly.

Now I’ll be talking about infinitesimals, okay, like your steering wheel itself, is normally you can steer big or you can steer just ever so slightly, tightly. And I’ll be talking about infinitesimals, on a practical scale. Very very tiny movements. Now one could argue that his leaning to the left, and maybe shifting an inch or two on his seat, would that make a difference? Well, if you think not, then you consider that after 500 miles of a race, it may end up as a photo finish between two people. So infinitesimals would add up, and they could change the course of the whole race. There’s a whole lot of other things that are interesting about this kind of thing. Well first, well look at this, can you all read this little note here? All the tires for the Indy, are supplied by Firestone, it’s as highly organized just like the Romans did it, you know, it’s very organized. So all the tires by Firestone. And they provide 132 tires per car. (audience murmuring)

Now, 33 cars so it ends up with almost 4400 tires per yearly event. That’s a lot of waste you might think, you know, but they don’t always use up all the tires. Now typically, only about ten sets are used in one given race. And of course there’s qualifying events, and practice runs and so on, and in a real race a tire may only last 100 miles, out of 500 miles. There’s also different tires for dry and wet conditions, you know, so the team decides which sets of tires to use, and it’s a constant decision making process, incredibly complex, and it involves physical and mental activities, of a highest order. So it’s kind of fun to watch this but you will see that the ancients did this kind of thing a little bit differently but also similarly.

Well, for one thing you notice that the tires are not the same. You will see, from this and the next view, that it’s obvious that the rear tire is wider and bigger than the front tire. So you can’t just mix the tires here. Furthermore, furthermore, the rear right tire, is about 1/3 of an inch larger in diameter than the other rear tire.

This is in the Indy. The reason is twofold, mainly, mainly, there may be other reasons, I see two reasons. One is that there’s more wear on that right rear tire. Because this is what happens. On, on the curve to the left, there’s a weight transfer to the right wheels. So they have a much bigger load than the left wheels. On the right rear of the Indy tire, it’s actually the load is about six times larger, on a curve, than just standing still. it’s about 2800 pounds out of a 1500 pound car.

Well, we’ll come back to that issue, we discussed with the Romans. So it’s a fascinating sort of thing. The other reason, besides the wear on the right side, is that the rear wheels are locked, there’s no differential on these cars. So there’s a lot of slipping and so on, and you want to turn left most of the time. About half the time, half the length of the race, is turning, that means you want to turn a lot, and if you make the right wheel larger in diameter, it will force a leftward drift. In horses it’s called left bent, and it is one of the reasons why counterclockwise races were developed by the ancients, because perhaps most of the horses they used, were left-bent, it’s a anatomical difference in the structure of the horse. It’s fascinating business.

Well, there’s other things with respect to racing and of course we’re talking about super athletes, and super athletes have to be very comfortable on unstable platforms. And, this little guy is that way. And uh, oh that’s m me! (chuckling)

Now if you can’t read it, it’s 1936, I’m 14 months old, I’m on my uncle’s hand, and we are both wearing kind of a ancient versions of a modern high- tech Speedo suit. (audience chuckling) Now the hand, holding the little guy, is an unstable platform. Well there are, for an unstable platform of that kind, which is similar actually to, ships and airplanes, to some extent, there’s six distinct motions possible. Three of ’em are linear motions, up or down, sideways, front and back, they’re simple linear. This is where Newton excelled. He excelled in analyzing this, linear kind of motion. The other three motions are, rotary motions, okay the hand could, do this, like a ship or an airplane, or that, or this, or yaw, okay, there are special names for all of these, and Newton for some reason was not very up on these kind of motions. (audience chuckling)

He missed, I would say, he totally missed all kinds of rotary inertia type of things, okay? However, the ancients knew how to do it. Now I’m going to go to a little uh, not calisthenics, but uh, (audience chuckling) kind of a chronological, road map or scale or something like that. So assume that my six foot wingspan, is 4000 years. Time flows from that end to this end as normally. And this point here is today. That means that this is the beginning of our calendar, isn’t it? Right here.

This also, Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar, roughly, and Nero, just a little bit off, you know, things like that. So it was a very important period, as it is for me too. (audience chuckling) And so if you look at this, my elbow just happens to be at a thousand. That’s perfect. As if I was counting on it from way back. So, Newton was, about here. By the way the automobile age is only about two inches here. And back here goes all kinds of things you know, like I will show you some things that go back, but, Tutankhamun was at around 1330, so it’s here. A little bit further to the right, like about an inch or so, is the “Iliad,” Troy. And the Constantinople races that I was introducing, was at around, 500 A.D., so that would be halfway here.

The Biblical quotation that I mentioned, would you guess where that is? That’s at -450, roughly, best I could guess, and actually Ecclesiasticus was probably a pen name for King Solomon. So we’ll move on, now we’ll come back to this scale again, okay because there are other issues here. By the way the, the history of chariot racing is, probably from about 800 B.C., you know the Olympics and so on, and it went on to 1200 A.D., when Constantinople was sacked. And if you remember but way back there, the layout of the Hippodrome, and I showed the starting gates? On the top of those starting gates were four, beautiful gilded large-sized horses. Which in 1200 A.D., the good crusaders, sacked Constantinople and took those horses, and took them back to Venice, where they now sit inside San Marco Temple, or (mumbles), it’s a little cathedral or something, and replicas are sitting outside in the front, for people with cameras. (audience chuckling)

So, eventually, from that little guy on the hand I got to this point, and at that time when we made the NOVA film, on the side I created my own documentary on making the documentary, for PBS NOVA. And this is from that side documentary. This was never on TV, okay? And never will be unless maybe today. (audience chuckling)

So this is an unstable platform of a different sort. You know this, this kind of a machine is not as unstable as a ship or an airplane. But it is unstable nevertheless. Now, back to Newton a little bit, just for a moment, then I’ll come back to him later on again. So his, he’s just there now you know, sitting under this apple tree and about to discover the linear mass inertia concept. He did not however as I mentioned already, have the mental power or interest, probably he didn’t have the interest and he was discouraged by moving things, already, so he did not discover, the fact that bodies, especially rigid bodies or nearly rigid bodies can accelerate and move in three dimensional situations, which complicates the analysis to the point where it becomes very difficult, very difficult to determine the inertia properties.

Oh, now we’ve changed venue, okay? So we go, we go to, Albuquerque. By the way, you may have noticed already that most of my stuff is about dry climates. (audience chuckling) I have very little from wet climates. So, archeologist goes there, orders an alien beer. This is very appropriate because, this place is very close to Area 51, of Roswell, where UFOs were found! (audience chuckling)

Now, what will come next you would think that aliens had a lot to do with that, connecting the Middle East, you know, with New Mexico, but I think it’s not the case. Because, archeologist looks into the dining room and sees a very strange wheel, and this wheel, just sits in the corner of this restaurant and bar. Well it has what is called lunate cutouts, which is similar to what Peter Huston, a friend of mine found in Spain just a few years ago. So here’s a design, aside from the iron parts, you know, some of these have iron parts. But aside from that the basic design is close to 5000 years old. So, what happens is, that originally you all know that wheels were kind of solid chunks of wood. And then people tried to lighten them and make them better to accelerate and stronger and whatever, yet nevertheless. So, this was one of the first, amazingly major intellectual steps in developing a wheel. You know go from a very solid chunk of wood, and you cut it out, to make it lighter, so in a sense, this is kind of the beginning of a, this one would be a two-spoke wheel, okay so it’s on the way toward inventing the spoked wheel. Which by the way has other alternative theories as to how they developed. But this is a good one actually.

So this kind of a wheel exists now. People found them in the Philippines, and in Portugal and Spain, you know, no, they exist, they’re working machines. So now we take a look at the map of this area. It has always been hotly contested and still is.

So we look at uh, there’s Troy, I will talk about that, a little bit soon. By the way the origin of the chariot had probably a lot to do with things happening in the Hittite empire. From there it went to Egypt, and then to Greece, and to Rome, and other places. Oh, to the “Iliad.” Just quickly read this.

Is this a real chariot description?

No way, no way.

Chariots by definition are lightweight, fast, maneuverable, and a person stands on it, there may be two, or three, that doesn’t matter, but people stand on it. But this one is a, a beautiful description, a poetic description of a chariot, but it’s not practical. It would be too heavy, the materials are not, not for a vehicle. Nevertheless, they’re watching Achilles, from a tower probably, and they’re looking down, there’s a lull in the war, and they’re looking at Achilles running this games. What they were doing, involved some chariots. Here’s what they looked like, you know these are, these are not original photographs but uh, they are from vases, typically the Greeks have a lot of beautiful vases and a lot of stories of importance, have been put on vases.

So this is a, one view, and the next one is a closeup from a vase, which happens to be sitting in Minneapolis, at the museum, Institute of Art. And this really shows a fantastic wheel. By the way, this description, in the “Iliad,” of a chariot race that Achilles was organizing, is the earliest mention of any chariot race in literature. So this has to be taken seriously. Well there are two important things here, that are worth mentioning. One is, that notice that the spokes are fat near the hub, and thin toward the rim. This is excellent design, because, on a curve, the wheel would bend, like a cantilever beam around these spokes, so they have to be strong near the hub, on the other hand they have to be very light on the outside for overall weight reduction and to be able to accelerate the wheel. That’s the kind of thing that you wouldn’t miss.

Now this is, a kind of a brief, quick, theoretical view, of the rotational inertia concept. What is important here, is that you take a mass element, and you multiply it by the square of this distance, and that is the rotational inertia of that little element. For the whole wheel you would have to create a summation or integrate over the whole body and, this is not easy to do. Now Newton would have been able to handle the distance squared business because he dealt with that kind of stuff, you know, in astronomy, so he was familiar with the math, and it would have been no problem for him. But he did not appreciate a,the simple fact that if you take a spoke, and you take a small mass element, and you attach it say at half way out, it has one particular moment, inertia, rotational inertia with respect to this axis. But if you move it out, twice the distance, it would be quadruple the inertia. So it is an issue that is bugging people even today, because it is not easy to achieve a perfect wheel and it is impossible in fact. You cannot make it strong enough, and at the same time light enough, to have no mass, virtually anywhere, you know and be strong enough.

So anyway, we will move on from this, and now I will give you a short little description of what a real chariot looks like. This is kind of a model that I had made at one time. And the important things are, the pole, which actually acts as a bending beam and a torsion element, and, we have an interesting little thing, a so-called sun disc, which is the earliest rear-view mirror. (audience chuckling) ‘Course this is not how it was in a real chariot, they just show it that way, I’ll show you a picture of that, how they are represented.

I’ll move on but actually this pole can move back and forth, this bar is flexible. By the way the whole chariot is full of springs and shock absorbers, because wood is a spring, and the only other materials, that are involved, in the structure, are leather, rawhide, or glue. There’s maybe a little decorative gold, or something, but they’re not structural elements.

So this is not a chariot, okay, because it’s not light, it is not fast, and it’s not maneuverable. (audience chuckling) Here’s a more or less a chariot, but still not terribly good. This is a Celtic chariot, in front of the British Museum. It’s a replica, very faithfully made, and it has a harsh ride, and uh, not a great chariot. But it is, an almost chariot (chuckles).

Here’s another one, this is the famous Monteleone Chariot, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Those folks have stolen it from Italy, and they’re still arguing about the ownership, of course. Now this is very heavily, bronze. So this is not like either, it’s not a racing machine and it would not win any good races. Here however, is a real chariot. This one is called the Florence Chariot, it’s in Florence, Italy, and nobody knows who owned it way back, it’s Egyptian for sure. It’s very lightweight, it only has four spokes. And, the disadvantage of the four spokes is this, when you’re rolling along, under load, it can bend, the rim can bend, and then it comes back up again when it hits the spoke, and it causes a bounce of the axle. This wheel bounce is really a terrible problem. Only pneumatic tires have solved the problem, later on, but it is a bad problem.

This is a beautiful machine by the way, and the next kin of that chariot is from Tut’s tomb. Now there are a number of things of interest here, this image is a small part of a two-foot long wooden box, called a painted box, that was found in Tut’s tomb. And the image itself is only about, 1/4 of that or maybe less, so you can imagine the exquisite brush strokes, that go into this to create this small image, with so much detail. Here’s the mirror that I was mentioning. For their audience these artists had to show the mirror sideways, even though it’s kind of like a Frisbee shaped thing, and facing the driver. So in reality, imagine this turned toward the driver, and it’s like a right side rear-view mirror of your car. It says objects in this mirror may appear to be closer than they really are. No, farther, farther than they really are. (audience chuckling) Farther than they really are, right.

Another interesting thing is that, notice the driver, Tutankhamun, he is shooting arrows while he is driving, and he’s driving fast, the horses are leaping, the reins are on his waist. So he’s steering with his waist. And the idea here is that, if you lean forward you relax the reins, and you encourage the horses, and they will accelerate. If you lean back, you brake. If you twist your waist, you turn. Now it takes some skill obviously and it’s not for the average driver. (audience chuckling)

Here’s another beautiful view of that mirror, it’s a convex mirror, okay. You could probably replicate this. Actually, this golden apple, which was from Troy, (audience chuckling) shows that sort of thing. This is a convex mirror. I can see the lights in it. It’s crude, obviously. But it would be enough for the driver to see an assassin leaping up behind him.

Here’s my friend, Ray, who, proved to me that it’s possible to do complex driving with the waist alone. He’s driving, he’s a world champion stunt kite flier, and in this case he’s flying three enormous, you know, these are seven or eight foot wing span kites, and they’re doing all kinds of maneuvers, one in each hand and one on the waist.

Now, the construction, of the Egyptian wheels, was unbelievably complex. No modern engineer would come up with this kind of a design. We are just not thinking in that sense. What this implies, it’s a little dark unfortunately, but the spokes were not straight pieces of wood, but they were V-shaped, they were cut in V-shapes, and they were attached like this, going around, making six new composite spokes. Each spoke is tapered, it’s thicker near the hub, you can see that, okay. It’s thicker near the hub where it should be. It’s thinner toward the outside, where it should be thinner. All throughout it has an elliptical cross section, just beautifully machined. Honestly very expensive, but this kind of construction lasted about five or 600 years, before the economics drove it out of business.

Now, back to the film, here’s a quick review of what was going on in construction of a couple of Tut chariots. This is a carpenter shop, clicking) here’s what they were doing, there’s the new wheels uh, two cowhides, total cowhides were used for the bodies of the chariot. A little Egyptian boy helping.

Here’s my work, in the Cairo museum, with the team. Here’s Tut’s gold chariot, also called the Sun Chariot. Here’s an axle of that chariot. Here’s a studio, behind it are the Giza pyramids outside. Those are my models. That’s the director of the movie. (clicking) Here comes something interesting. Always something interesting can be learned from a replica, if it’s faithfully done. What I notice here for example, a couple of things that I learned from the replica making. Suddenly I noticed that there was a sound. (squeaking) You can play with that. (audience chuckling) In your car, you hate any squeaks and rattles. In a chariot they’re good. Because, and it’s rattles, you know, this thing running, in the test course, it rattles to high heavens, okay? And it squeaks, it squeaks similar to that, and all kinds of different squeaks.

The fact is that squeaking is a sign of energy absorption. It’s rubbing, parts, leather, rawhide, wood, they’re rubbing, okay? And if rubbing is energy absorption, what we call shock absorbers, okay? You don’t have to have a car shock absorber. This works equally well. Ah there’s a, pyramid behind.

Here is a, a test run being readied in the desert. This is the Sahara by the way. Here’s a less common test run, in water, to prove how these things work. Now we jump into Rome. This is a mock up of Rome, of Central Rome, from about 2000 years ago. So the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, it’s the same design as what I showed before. It’s a little bigger, just a little bigger. And the Romans were crazy about racing. Nero for one, was known to crawl on the floor you know playing with the toy chariots. And he was probably crazy, from about the age of four. (audience chuckling) Even as emperor he was crazy, and he drove.

Here’s a, Getty Museum object, you can see how nicely the Romans designed these spokes, highly tapered, smallish wheels, lightweight. And they had all kinds of animals pulling things. What you may remember, in this world of chariots, is the “Ben Hur” movie. This is a painting inspired by that movie. Kind of crazy, but you notice that the wheels are huge? Unrealistic. By the way, this race is considered by cinema experts, some that I know, I don’t know, Christen you may argue with that but, some cinema experts claim that this is the most exciting, real vehicle race in cinema history. It’s about nine or 10 minutes long. It’s worth watching, I mean, it is gripping. But, the vehicles involved were about 90, 95% inaccurate. (audience chuckling)

Now you can create spectacle if you are a Hollywood engineer, you know, you don’t need the accuracy. Now here’s a perfect example of that. The real Roman racing chariots were virtually impossible to roll over. They had an inherent roll over resistance. Not against any tipping, oh they could tip a little. Okay, so they, they could roll a little, but they would not roll over as long as the horses were running straight, because through the yoke and through the pole, they would keep the thing running level. (thumping)

So what did your Hollywood folks do? They made roll overs! (audience chuckling) So, but not all of ’em! So the hero should not roll over, okay? But the villain can roll over, okay, so they create, they create a joint here in the pole.

By the way this whole harnessing and setup, hasn’t even been invented for another 1000 years. (audience chuckling) So, this joint here, allows the chariot to roll over, any number of times, you know like a propellor, and the horses are still running straight. (audience chuckling) But other chariots were not equipped with this and they were perfectly safe.

This is by the way the typical outfit of a Roman driver. This is not Nero but I’m sure that Nero wore the same kind of outfit. Notice the crash helmet, there’s a crash helmet, a crash vest, there’s leggings, leather leggings to protect the legs, in a case of some crash. Crashes did occur, even without roll overs. And driving boots, you now this is very similar to the fire resistant outfit of a modern Indy driver or NASCAR.

This is a mosaic, about six or seven feet long, quite large, on the floor, in Lyon, France. It’s slightly damaged, but you notice, at least one big crash going on here. This is a collapse, it’s not a rollover, it’s a wheel collapsed, and the driver being thrown. So this is at the corner, you know the corner is the most dangerous parts, you know, the vehicle is sliding sideways, you drive into it full speed, you slide sideways, and you accelerate out again. This is the best way of doing it. There’s another crash in progress, that’s not very visible in the slide, in, on this corner, I mean each corner is a bad one. So here it’s already starting to wobble, you can judge from the mosaic. This driver has, been an expert on, chariot races and the venues.

Here’s a closeup view, of that actual crash. The driver is flat down, face flat down on top of the horses. He’s still gripping his whip. The reins on the other hand. What you don’t see is any iron tire, there’s no evidence here of an iron tire. Iron was already known to the Romans at this time. Now comes the most beautiful little device from the British Museum (chuckling), among others. It’s about nine inches long, it’s a bronze model of a chariot, the best representation of a Roman chariot because there’s no real ones surviving. It’s amazing, there’s eight Tut-type of chariots surviving, because of different funerary customs. The Romans and the Greeks did not have anything surviving of this kind.

So this is tiny but it shows the small wheels, the spokes are tapered, it’s beautifully done, and what is obvious here, not obvious, to me it seemed like because I was theoretically thinking about this as well, that only the right wheel had an iron tire, not the left wheel. So this was the Roman racing equivalent of the Indy 500 car. You need, you need, durability on the right wheel. You need strength, and you need compression. Now the compression is what I call the python effect. (audience chuckling) When you heat shrink the iron tire, on a wooden wheel, when it cools down it crunches it down, and it creates a very firm, consolidated wheel. So the iron tire has several functions, and it’s great, it’s great, but it is expensive, and it is probably not a good idea to have on every wheel. So, here’s the size of this little thing.

So this is what Nero does. Or and his engineers, obviously. This is not exact by any means but we can speculate. What are the relative probabilities, of surviving a race? Well, you obviously want to survive the race, but you want to also win, so, if you have absolutely no iron tires, you have the lightest vehicle, You are very likely to win, if you’re surviving the race. But as you saw from the Lyon mosaic, that’s not a given. It’s more likely that you will fall apart at one of the corners.

So it’s a big big chance. So, my speculation is that no iron tires has a good probability of winning. Two iron tires have less because now it’s heavier. So that will survive, but not as number one. On the other hand, if you only have an iron tire on the right side, you may not win, there’s a whole lot of other factors, okay, what did the horses eat for breakfast, you know, that kind of thing, so there’s a lot of factors coming into this, but, chances are, over many years of racing, that the one with only one iron tire on the average would come out number one. He will survive the race, and all the others will be too heavy, or not making it.

So now about Nero. Why was he doing this? He was by the way a, I would say a good average driver. He was a fanatic driver, he was not a great driver. I mean we know other really great drivers, somebody like winning 1500 races in a lifetime, and not dying (chuckles). (audience chuckling) Nero raced, he probably won some, he lost many, I would say he was a good driver, and why was he doing it? Because he was an artist, he wanted to be with the people. He wanted the smell, he wanted the heat, he wanted the sweat. People really loved him for this. It’s amazing you know, it was the nobility who hated him more, the average person didn’t. They love him for what he was.

Now, future, where is the future with all of this? And I this is the end by the way, more or less. There’s an infinity of things that could be done, obviously. Not all of them would be money-making, although, if one gets into the depth of the mechanical sciences and using computerized analysis of the pole, and the frictional elements and so on and so forth, it’s complicated enough, to win you a good job in the aerospace industry, just by learning you know, the technique, and the thinking, and what goes on to solving big problems.

The other one is just going in a standard kind of thing, there’s a lot that has to be done yet, and diversium have to be studied more. We barely know about it. Unfortunately, most of the evidence is written up in Greek, or French, or German, or Russian. So not very many people are capable of even
looking at the literature, and there’s no complete description in English of these things. So here’s that Porphyrius that I mentioned.

And here’s my young student, Sandra, of Barcelona. This is Tut’s gold chariot under restoration. And this one is Tut’s funeral bed. Now this particular picture does not appear anywhere in the world yet. And you probably would never see the two together.

Thank you. (applauding)

– Good afternoon.