Archimedes' screw Archimedes' screw An Archimedes' screw, also known by the name the Archimedean screw or screw pump, is a machine used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation ditches. Water is pumped by turning a screw-shaped surface inside a pipe. The screw pump is commonly attributed to Archimedes, on the occasion of his visit to Egypt. This tradition may reflect only that the apparatus was unknown to the Greeks before Hellenistic times and was introduced in Archimedes's lifetime by unknown engineers. Depictions of Greek and Roman water screws show them being powered by a human treading on
Archimedes of circles. The earliest known copy of the text is in Arabic. The scholars T.L. Heath and Marshall Clagett argued that it cannot have been written by Archimedes in its current form, since it quotes Archimedes, suggesting modification by another author. The "Lemmas" may be based on an earlier work by Archimedes that is now lost. It has also been claimed that Heron's formula for calculating the area of a triangle from the length of its sides was known to Archimedes. However, the first reliable reference to the formula is given by Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD.