An
artifact from the 4th century was discovered in Vinkovci, Croatia, in
2012. At first thought to be just another dish used by the occupying
Romans, its inner workings have been determined to be a joke cup.
Archaeologist Dr. Richard Hobbs of the British Museum calls it the
earliest known example of a practical joke. The cup has an image of the
Greek mythological figure Tantalus, who was doomed to stay in sight of
fruit he couldn't eat and water he couldn't drink. Similarly, anyone who
drank from this cup would see wine
spill onto their clothing instead of reaching their lips.
The
Tantalus cup sounds like a dribble glass, but that prank simply has
holes hidden in a design on the side so that the liquid leaks when the
cup is tipped. The Tantalus cup has a much more elegant design based on
the physics of a siphon and can be traced to the Greek mathematician
Pythagoras, who is more famous for his theorem: “In a right-angled
triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal [to the sum of] the
squares of the two other sides” or a2 + b2 = c2. Pythagoras wasn’t
exactly a prankster and his invention was better known as the Greedy cup
after its true purpose – to keep drinkers from imbibing too much.
The image shows how the
Pythagorean cup works. You can see the
Tantalus cup here.
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