What Actually was Greek Fire?

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[barbiquearea]

Although the recipe for Greek Fire was lost to the ages, the flamethrower design would find its way to China. The Pen Huo Qi (literally meaning "fire spraying device") first saw action in the 10th century, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. It's design was based on blueprints from seventh century Byzantine siphons. They were reverse engineered to have dual bellows. This upgrade allowed Chinese fire siphons to achieve a more continuous flame, basically allowing them to have a constant stream of fire using liquid naphtha like modern day flamethrowers, rather than in short bursts. And just like the Byzantines, the Chinese did make use of these crude flamethrowers offensively, such as mounting them on ships or bringing them to the battlefield on four wheeled pushcarts. However the Chinese tended to use this weapon defensively. Flamethrowers would often be mounted on the walls of cities or forts where they would fire down upon soldiers assaulting the walls or burn down incoming siege engines.

[dhawthorne]

There was definitely some sort of oxidizer in the mix to get the petroleum products ripping like that. Kerosene and Naphthalene (gasoline) aren't actually all that flammable on their own. They either need to be atomized, vaporized or wicked.

The other thing that stood out is how it managed to burn things quickly to ash even though it was a coating. If you soak a piece of paper in rubbing alcohol, the paper won't burn unless there is isopropyl alcohol left after the water has vaporized. Another example is the use of gelled gasoline for immolation stunts, because the fuel boiling off prevents any heat from making it to the performer. It would seem this stuff behaves more like white phosphorus. With all of the alchemy and early science being done at the time, plus the knowledge of distillation, it is fully possible they stumbled upon phosphorus over a millennium before it's rediscovery.

[Pavlos_Charalambous]

Fun fact
Greek fire is known in Greek as liquid fire (Υγρό πυρ)

[ClellBiggs]

I love the smell of Greek fire in the morning.

[ninjaswordtothehead]

I don't know about Greek Fire, but i do know styrofoam peanuts dissolved in gasoline is some pretty nasty stuff.

[garryferrington]

Terry Jones covered this ages ago with some great special effects. Not as many extracts from ancient texts, though.

[turtletom]

Spoiler they don't ever tell you what actually was Greek fire

[ravenhill_firelord_]

love it when Simon covers historic content, because that's my area.

[kennystrawnmusic]

Probably the best means of reconstruction, one would assume, would be to look for wrecked Arab ships from the time when Greek fire was first used and put the charred remains of them under a spectrometer to determine the composition of the combustion products, since those combustion products will give us a clue about what it was that produced them, especially the incomplete ones. Without any documentation, modern analysis tools are our next best thing.

The later recipe from the early 1200s mentioned pine trees, which is the main source of not only resin that can be used as a thickener but also, and this wasn’t mentioned in the video either, toluene, a highly flammable solvent and the main precursor to TNT, which was first isolated by distilling pine oil. Adding saltpeter, quicklime, and sulfur to toluene, plus adding some tar as a thickener, might thus come pretty damn close to replicating the original recipe given what we’ve been told.

[yates]

Maybe Simon can tell us “what not to do” with the translation. That way we know what we shouldn’t do.

[xpndblhero]

Some of the descriptions make me think of burning plastic The dripping sound is mental and when you get a lot it sounds like screaming. That was one of my favorite discoveries as a kid.... 😁👍

[tarantulapettingzoo]

The formula for Greek fire is in the manuscript “book of fires for burning the enemy” we still have copies

[keithwalmsley]

Greek fire was indeed an awesome and battle-winning weapon and certainly the precursor of napalm as it apparently burnt even on water but the first recorded use of a genuine flamethrower is from 424 BC when the wooden walls of Delium were apparently destroyed by some form of flamethrower thus destroying the Athenian defenders during the Peloponnesian War. It appears to have been some form of early "bellows" that could spurt flame, although it wasn't Greek Fire as such.

[barbiquearea]

This is where George RR Martin got his inspiration for Wildfire.

[twistedyogert]

So Greek fire was similar to modern napalm, a petroleum fuel (modern napalm is made from thickened gasoline or diesel) mixed with a thickening agent.

[VistaViews]

I wonder if the rather vast archive at the Vatican might contain a more detailed account of how to produce greek fire?

[crnhman]

As an Englishman I can honestly say that Simon has the most quintessentially English accent

[pistachiopoptarts]

Douse your gyros in Taco Bell Diablo sauce and ghost peppers. There's your Greek Fire.

[larrybethune]

The Greek Fire substrate was photosensitive? Interesting.

[honeybadger]

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