This book aims to prove, through a comprehensive layout of ancient coins, artifacts, monuments, and literature, that the ancients used electricity to light up their temples, tombs, lighthouses, fortresses, palaces, cities and other edifices and critical areas.
No other work on the subject documents as much ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Assyrian, Indian, Greek, Roman, Parthian, Persian, and Sassanian as well as medieval evidence of this fact. Furthermore, the work recalls interesting details and descriptions (some of which have never before been translated into English) of the ancient Alexandrian Pharos Lighthouse and its reflective telescope and electric beacon.
The book presents easily readable explanation of carbon arc lights and a history of their use in nineteenth and twentieth-century searchlights (electric mirrors) and lighthouses. Its numerous illustrations, explanations, and historical testimony (from the horses' mouths) set a firm foundation for the reader to better understand the ancient advancements in electricity.
The editor (Larry Radka) has carefully laid out the ancient and modern illustrations (often in a comparative manner) on the appropriate pages that match up well with the text. Although this was time-consuming it means readers are not distracted by having to leap back and forth between the text and a bunch of pictures stuck in various parts of the book.
The ancient electric cells (batteries) found in Iraq in the 1930s and the evidence of ancient electroplating serve as a basis for the added proofs of the use of ancient electricity. From there, Radka presents illustrations of numerous artifacts and monuments that clearly demonstrate the use of ancient electric mirrors or searchlights. He also presents, what he describes as, strong evidence from cuneiform tablets and other sources that the ancients had all the materials (like copper, lead, iron, zinc, glass, sal ammoniac, sulfuric acid, etc.) at hand to make powerful primary and secondary electric cells. When we couple this to other ancient testimony of the use of extremely bright lights illuminating large areas, the only conclusion we can come to is that they had to have been powered by electricity.
The great Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson pointed out that the ancient Egyptian "paintings offer few representations of lamps, torches, or any other kind of light." Why--when they illustrate almost every other ancient Egyptian article? It is because people are not looking for ancient electric lights so they simply do not recognize them!
The Electric Mirror is published by Einhorn Press, 1314 Oak Street, Parkersburg, WV 26101, Telephone: (304) 485 3402. You can contact Radka at LarryBrianRadka--AT---hotmail.com