 When I first started researching for this course, I was on a family vacation in Germany with my family and we went to a Roman technology museum in Mayen, which is not too far from the Rhine, kind of between Cologne and Frankfurt. And there they have a number of Roman machines reconstructed. And this in this animation is a reconstruction of a water wheel powered marble saw. Here the water wheel isn't running, but this would be able to power two different saws working simultaneously, kind of moving back and forth the way that you see axles on a train cutting marble slabs. Here we're looking at a slightly different view and I'll start the video back up in a minute. I want you to know that this particular marble saw is based on images from a Roman tomb. There's an engraving depicting one of one such saw and also on some archaeological finds. And most of this material is from sort of the eastern part of the empire. It's a modern day turkey. And here you can see that the water wheel would have driven a piston that would have pushed a box with the saw back and forth. Here's the other box. You can see that it's not loaded with the saw and there's nothing for it to saw here. And then there's the water trough for the water to go away. Now I want you to see the actual blade itself of the saw. And as you can see this metal blade really is dull. This is just like the cutting wheel that we saw when we were looking at rock crystal. What this saw really relies upon is grit and abrasion. So here sand and water would have been used to actually cut into the marble. And the metal is simply a means of moving that abrasive back and forth. And if we take a closer look here and then I'm going to pan out and show you some of the material that we have next to the saw. Here's a smaller version of a saw that I'll show you in a moment. You can see some of the wet sand and grit that is used, that is left over there from actual slabbing. And you can actually work with this saw moving it back and forth. And then adding sand using water to pour away some of the excess. And this is just regular old playground sand and water. You can see them here in these buckets at the museum. Now I'm going to show you the saw in action. As you can see they're actually floating the saw slightly above the marble, not actually cutting it. But they do sometimes have it engaged with the marble cutting through it and making slabs. Very much like the marble countertops that you might see in your own house or someone else's house today. Just about a year after I went to Mayan and saw the Roman marble saw at the Technology Museum there. I was in Carrara, Italy doing additional research for this course. And I took a tour of the marble quarries and some of the workshops. I got to see a sculptor at work. And one of the most fascinating things was this modern marble saw in Carrara. And what I found out is that it works on exactly the same principle as the Roman saw we've been looking at. That is that it's using water and an abrasive. In this case the abrasive is probably industrial diamonds actually on the blade. But you can see the water is there to help lubricate and also get rid of the excess marble dust as the marble is being cut into slabs. So let's see it in action. Now we're back in Mayan, Germany. And that's my husband and son. At the time my son was 8 and he's 10 now as I'm recording this. But they are going to demonstrate first a small version of the Roman saw. This is a hand powered version of course. And then a larger version. So let's see those clips. Now we're looking at Paul and Will trying to use a much bigger saw. This is a real two man saw. And after they're done with this I'll show you some of the cuts that were made. So let's see them in action again. I think you can appreciate the advantage that the water wheel would have afforded to workers. The last thing I want to show you are some actual cuts that were made with the different saws that they have at this technology museum in Mayan. So here we'll play the clip and you can see some of those scraps. They look a lot like what you would find at a building store or if you went to a marble countertop place in a city. And all of this cutting is done doing simple play sand like what you see here.