WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 116, 17 April 1939, Page 9

WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

PRECISION. We boast to-day that we are able to measure with a precision never known Oetore. Ibis is true. We have instruments with which we can measure to the millionth part of an inch, and clocks which keep time correct to the smallest part oi a second. Hut it stirs us, surely, to remember tii;»t long ago tile old Greeks, knowing nothing ul our methods and having none ol our advantages and experience and materials, should be as marvellously accurate as they were.

When we come to examine the Parthenon minuteiy we are humbled.

The glory of Athens, it shows a precision at which we must ever be amazed.

Designed by Ictinus and standing oil the Acropolis, it was begun over -Jot) years beiore Christ, a Doric temple o! peerless form. Hut we are impressed most of all hv the accuracy of the craftsmen who raised it—the pillars, for example, being made up of huge stone drums, each fitting so exactly that to-day except for slight discolorations it would lie almost impossible to detect where one drum ends and another begins.

W’hat is more, it is now known to he an optical illusion that when at some distance we stand looking at a tapering eolum, i! seems to have slightly concave sides if it is truly shaped. In order, therefore, to make the pillars appear true, the Greek's curved them outwards the least hit (calculating the amount to a fraction of an inch) thus giving them an erectness not achieved by subsequent builders who might have been expected to succeed where the Greeks ought to Even the entablature of the pediment was made to curve out of the have failed. true to tlie extent of three inehes in order to make it appear straight!— (L)-