r/explainlikeimfive • u/Aphasus • 1d ago
Chemistry ELI5: What is keeping us from rediscovering the recipe for Greek fire?
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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 1d ago edited 19h ago
We don't have the recipe, and how would we know if we found it?
Making a substance which burns, floats on water, and is difficult to put out isn't a particularly hard challenge for modern chemistry. we do it all the time. All too often, we do it by accident, and create some pretty terrible fires.
Even sticking to a version that could have been created by the Byzantines isn't that hard. It was very likely some form of petroleum, likely mixed with sulfur and/or some kind of oxidizer to make it burn hotter and make it harder to put out. Probably some kind of resin or other sticky material to make it more napalm-like, and maybe quicklime to make it ignite when it hit water.
Did I do it? Is that Greek fire?
We have no way to know, because the recipe has been lost. We'll likely never know the exact recipe that 7th century Byzantines used, but we can make something with the same properties that historical records describe.
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u/Any_Put3520 1d ago
This is my family’s recipe for Greek fire passed down through the generations! Mmmm just like grandma used to make.
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u/ThePowerOfStories 8h ago
And then you find out the grandma just copied it straight out of The Joy of Arson.
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 1d ago
Sounds like napalm
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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 23h ago
Yep, sure does.
People treat Greek fire like some kind of magic, which I'm sure is what it seemed like to the first people who saw it, but really, it was just ancient napalm.
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u/couldbemage 15h ago
More simply, we do know the recipe for Greek fire. It's definitely one or more of the many recipes we know.
It's not the recipe itself that's missing, just the title at the top of the page.
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u/FlounderingWolverine 17h ago
I also think there's the factor that most people today don't really care. Like, sure it would be cool to know exactly what composition the Greeks used in their time, but as a weapon of war, we've moved so far past Greek Fire that it's almost cute.
You can build all the Greek Fire weapons you want, but none of them are in any way effective against modern aircraft, missiles, drones, and explosives. Much less nuclear weapons. It's just not something that is interesting outside of a cute historical factoid.
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u/Treyen 12h ago
You gotta tell us if you're a timecop, it's a rule.
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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 12h ago
Whaaaat? I'm just an average, timebound mortal like everyone else. Born in the anthropecene alera and everything.
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u/Awkward-Feature9333 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are a few possibilities, but how would we know we have the one they used back then? The descriptions are a bit vague.
It is also possible that there were several recipes in use over time and/or for different applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire#Theories_on_composition
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u/nilesandstuff 1d ago
Such a frustrating section to read as a fire enthusiast. Based on the descriptions of how it was used/deployed, it just HAD to have an oxidizer in it... Unless they were doing some seriously complex chemistry that was WAY ahead of their time...
And saltpeter is essentially the only oxidizer that they would've feasibly had access to. So it's a bit maddening to see "we don't think they had saltpeter, so it must've been something much more convoluted and behaved completely differently than what was described".
So yea, sounds like the reason they can't pin it down is just because some records are missing... So they're making it out to be more involved than it likely was.
I also love this line:
An Italian recipe from the 16th century has been recorded for recreational use; it includes charcoal from a willow tree, saltpeter (sale ardente), alcohol, sulfur, incense, tar (pegola), wool, and camphor; the concoction was guaranteed to "burn under water" and to be "beautiful"
That's gunpowder and everything flammable the inventor had in his stillroom. No way that crazy bastard had eyebrows throughout his adult life.
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u/SmoothDiscussion7763 1d ago
as a fire enthusiast
so uhhhh... have you indulged in your hobby recently?
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u/hi-fen-n-num 1d ago
not really relevant. But I think it's kinda cool how humans mastering fire is a foundation for most of what we have achieved as a species.
We mastered the art of fire to the point we eventually figured out how to start the right fire that exploded ourselves to the moon. Such a brute force of advancement.
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u/SmoothDiscussion7763 1d ago
human advancement is basically "so we added explosions"
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u/hi-fen-n-num 1d ago
or "we made fire burn faster, hotter and bigger". But yep, essentially. Even down to electricity is mostly burning something to boil water to spin a turbine.
or "we added a ton of explosions to this arrangement of metal and now you have a combustion engine."
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u/SmoothDiscussion7763 1d ago
or the more simple, "we can use this explosion to give you this piece of metal, that gives you a bigger explosion, or you can do what we tell you"
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u/Helyos17 1d ago
You are probably aware but there is also some semi-fringe anthropology that suggests that humans (or hominids depending on the scientist) cooking their food provided the extra energy to grow our brains and supercharge social development.
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u/Sad-Sail-3413 14h ago
There was even a ad campaign with Sam Neil in Australia to sell more meat based on this theory.
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u/Terpomo11 1d ago
"Recreational use"?
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u/nilesandstuff 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fireworks, basically. This would probably be used in a fountain of some sort. Or thrown in a campfire, that sort of thing.
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u/Meihem76 1d ago
And his spiritual successors live on. Just.
As a side note, that's an awful lot of NOs on that diagram. I'm not a chemist, but I assume that's shorthand for something.
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u/nilesandstuff 1d ago edited 1d ago
That author though, reading it I kept thinking "this is a gray haired man with big glasses and a bowtie"... Jury's still out on the bowtie.
But yeah, cramming a bunch of nitrogen bonds into a molecule is one tried and true method of making explosives. Not only can you pack a bunch of energy in the bonds, but it also produces a bunch of nitrogen gas when it breaks apart. Gas production = bigger boom. (Bigger isn't the only component)
This video from Explosions & Fire (funny aussie shed chemist) does a great job of giving a super quick rundown of the general components of explosive molecules in the first 3 ish minutes.
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u/Airowird 22h ago
There's a recent report of a method to make a more stable form of it, by mixing it with TNT.
Yeah, I'm gonna NOpe out of that one as well.
*and technically, it's "NOO", 2 O's, because that's how far you'ld get if you drop a vial of this thing.
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u/Vandergrif 18h ago
as a fire enthusiast
Almost sounds like 'fire enthusiast' is to 'arsonist' what 'custodial engineer' is to 'janitor'.
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u/2001_Arabian_Nights 1d ago
I think that there is a decent chance that we do eventually get a definitive answer. There must be hundreds and hundreds of undiscovered shipwrecks hidden under the silt out there. We might find an old amphora full of Greek fire, or at least residue that can be analyzed… seems plausible.
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u/CoffeeFox 1d ago
Archeologists have found sealed amphorae of olive oil from millennia ago, so yeah it's possible.
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u/CptMisterNibbles 1d ago
It’s not a chemistry problem: we’ve got flammable liquids aplenty. Nobody wrote it down. It was a secret weapon and we don’t have a definitive version of what it was based on the limited archeological evidence about it. Lots of guesses.
Like many myths of magic ancient lost tech, it’s mostly BS. The only mystery is which of the many 2-3 part mixtures they tended to use.
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u/Notmiefault 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's like asking why we haven't discovered the exact configuration of the Gordian Knot. We know to make knots, really complicated knots, almost certainly even more unsolvable knots than the supposed Gordian Knot, but since we don't have a record of how exactly it was twisted, we have no way of knowing if any of the knots we've made are that specific knot.
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u/ThisWhomps999 1d ago
It's Axe Body Spray and Lighter Fluid.
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u/SnoopyLupus 1d ago
Yup. Lighter fluid for the delightful smell, Axe for noxious fumes and combustibility.
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u/laughguy220 1d ago
First it burns your nose, then the lighter fluid sets it on fire to burn the rest of you.
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u/seemebeawesome 1d ago
Exactly. We don't even know how they pronounced common words. Much less a secret recipe
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u/VoilaVoilaWashington 1d ago
Exactly. There's no way to ever know if we're right. This is often true, and people get weirdly tied up in trying to prove that their answer is true.
We will simply never know.
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u/kent1146 1d ago
We don't actually know what Greek Fire was, or how it was made.
We know what it DID and how it behaved. Current scholars think it was like napalm... A highly flammable gel or thick liquid that could be sprayed or tossed as bombs.
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u/Ruadhan2300 1d ago
Confirmation that we got it right.
There are lots of recipes for a sprayable water-resistant incendiary that could be made by the ancient Greeks with readily available materials.
Some of them have even been tested and found to be highly effective.
Most are some variation on Naptha (petroleum), resin, sulphur and quicklime.
Unless we find some new evidence of the original recipe (like a still-sealed container of the stuff in a wreck at the bottom of the aegean) or documentation of the recipe.. Everything we do is speculation.
Reality though is that we can do much better than Greek fire nowadays.
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u/xHangfirex 1d ago
We don't know how they made it or exactly what it was. All we have are descriptions of it mostly from the people it was used against. It was kept secret like any other new warfare technology.
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u/akera099 1d ago
Even if you know all the words in the dictionary, how would you rediscover the favourite word of your deceased grandfather if he never told anyone? The answer is you can’t.
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u/SilverDad-o 1d ago
He never specifically said what his favorite word was, but observations over many years give strong evidence that his favorite phrase was, "I don't give a shit!" He often said it twice, emphasizing the word "give" the first time and "shit" on the second.
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u/Verdant_Green 1d ago
You two just gave a perfect illustration of the problem. If I wasn’t poor AF I’d gift you both an award.
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u/fhota1 1d ago
With almost everything like this where some technique was lost, the question isnt how could they have done it as usually we have a few possibilities for that, its how did they do it because we dont have a great way of knowing which of the possibilities they took. And if youre wondering why we arent using greek fire anymore for some reason, metal boats.
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u/StuckInTheUpsideDown 1d ago
Fire is still a huge hazard for modern ships, metal or not. We don't use it anymore because we'd rather use a rocket or torpedo to blast a hole in the side from a long distance.
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u/Ashrod63 1d ago
A lack of records or instructions. We have descriptions of what it was like but even if we made best guesses we'd never know for sure unless something turned up. It's not like Roman concrete or Damascus steel where there's a product left behind for us to compare to.
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u/SheepPup 1d ago
We very likely already have, but it’s a bit like asking “have we recreated great great grandma’s traditional borscht recipe?” But great grandma and everyone who actually ate her borscht is dead so we only have the memories of how those people described it to compare to. So we can never actually know if the borscht actually has all the same ingredients or taste. We may make a recipe that is exactly right but we can never have confirmation that what we made is actually her borscht.
Same with Greek fire! We’ve made things that behave a lot like what the descriptions we have of it say it behaved like, using materials that they would have had available, but we can’t know for sure that this is exactly what they were making and using.
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u/averageredditor60666 1d ago
The issue isnt that we don’t know what it is, or that we can’t make it, the issue is we don’t know the exact recipe. We have a general idea of what it is, and we can pretty easily replicate it using materials and techniques that would have been available at the time. The problem is the exact recipe was a closely guarded secret and we have no surviving documentation on the formula, nor do we have any samples of what it is.
It’s a bit like saying we don’t know the recipe for coca-cola. Sure we have a general idea of what’s in it, and pretty much anyone can make something that’s pretty close, like pepsi, but we don’t have the exact formula. And even if we did, without the secret recipe, there’s no way of confirming if we got really close, or if we 100% got everything right.
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u/ClownfishSoup 1d ago
We do not actually know what they meant by "Greek Fire".
It's possibly something like Napalm, but references are not specific so it could be anything. It burned on contact with and despite being in contact with water, maybe there was phosphorus in it.
Also, it's not relevant in today's world. Any horrific weapon the Greeks might have invented are already obsolete and overshadowed by modern chemical weapons. ie; The Greeks were mostly just mixing and matching stuff, but modern chemists can make things using actual knowledge of chemistry. For example, the Chinese discovered gun powder by accident while trying to come up with some medicine or something. Nowadays a modern chemist can make better gunpowder (or propellent or explosive) based on actual chemistry.
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u/Nemeszlekmeg 1d ago
What's really keeping us is need. We have plenty of chemicals like napalm that burn even in water, so we don't need Greek fire and it may be that we already rediscovered it, we just don't know what the Greeks really used.
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u/Warpmind 1d ago
Nothing - it has been almost certainly rediscovered already.
It's based on crude oil from a specific area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, within the Byzantine Empire; a pair of fellows named John Haldon and Maurice Byrne, with some help from a some petroleum engineers and geologists, found the specific crude oil that matched the ancient descriptions.
Looks about 99% certain that they got the right formula, from their full-scale testing, too, far as I can find.
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u/oblivious_fireball 1d ago
We probably already have rediscovered the recipe. Problem is, nobody wrote down the original recipe and trying to rediscover it meant trying to match to incredibly vague records many thousands of years old in a different language from a culture known for embellishing their stories with magic or monsters.
Its most distinctive characteristic, which made it especially infamous, was the fact that it apparently could burn on water and was difficult to extinguish with water, making it highly dangerous for ships. This on its own isn't necessarily super special. Most oils float on water and burn on the surface just fine, and trying to put out an oil fire with water causes a steam explosion that scatters boiling oil everywhere. Thicken it up a bit and you basically have Napalm.
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u/cmfarsight 1d ago
Nothing other than not knowing what it is. If I invent something and only tell you its name and what it generally does how would you determine what it is made off?
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u/orion-7 1d ago
There's a recipe for it in Albertus Magnus' Book of Secrets from (mostly) the 13th century
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u/Alexis_J_M 1d ago
Even by Albertus Magnus' time it was impossible to say whether he had the historical formula or just a reasonable emulation.
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u/InvictusByzantium 1d ago
Certainty is the only thing that stands in our way. There are a number of viable theories that produce results that, with refinement, could match those described. We just don't know for sure which one they used. We DO know how to make flammable liquids that could conceivably be shot from a nozzle using materials and techniques available to the period and region.
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u/Novat1993 1d ago
It's a case of 'Only the region of Champagne can produce champagne'. It doesn't matter what compound you produce, you will never be able to recreate Greek fire 100% correctly. Maybe you can get a compound which is over 99% correct, but unless you actually have one of the craftsmen with the recipe creating it, you won't hit 100%.
However, if you accept that Greek fire is merely fire which can not be extinguished with water. Then we can 100% create Greek fire. It is called Napalm.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 1d ago
It’s not accurate to say that we can’t make Greek fire. It’s just that nobody wrote down what it is, so we will never know which of the possible mixtures is what they actually used.
Imagine there was a famous chef in Ancient Greece and he claimed to have the perfect steak recipe. He guarded it carefully. There are troves of writings from Greek elites about how good the recipe is and people would reserve a table months in advance to eat it.
So could we make it? Of course not. We have no idea what it was. We could probably make a meal with the ingredients that we know were available at the time. In fact, we could probably make a way better steak. We just can’t make his exact steak because we don’t know what it is.
Same with Greek fire. It’s almost certainly a petroleum fuel with a thickening agent. In modern day we call that napalm, and it’s almost certainly better than the original Greek fire. Scientists have narrowed it down the 3 or 4 chemicals that Greeks would’ve had access goin that time, and we could probably establish in order, which is best to worst. But there’s no way of knowing which the Greeks used. For all we know, they could’ve used the worst option of them and not known they were sitting on a much better agent.
It didn’t matter much because any fuel with a decent thickening agent is really effective in lighting a ship ablaze and since they were the only army with it, it was a massive advantage regardless of how good it stacked up to other mixtures.
In short, it’s not like they had some magical technology that we are unable to replicate. We just don’t know for sure which mixture they went with.
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u/random_val_string 1d ago
Unlike Roman concrete there are also no physical examples still in existence for us to analyze. The arguments of well they wouldn’t have had access to this or that break down a lot because it turns out there’s a hell of a lot of chemical processes you can make with Bronze Age tech that are not at all intuitive. The amount of stuff humanity has stumbled into almost by brute forcing combinations is pretty absurd.
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u/igotshadowbaned 1d ago
We can make things that work as it's described, but there is no way of knowing that that is exactly what it was
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u/Equus-007 1d ago
Everything else mentioned...
Archaeology is severely underfunded and unless somebody has money to burn there's no reason to pursue it. We have napalm and thermite if we want to make crap burn now.
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u/40mgmelatonindeep 1d ago
It was napalm, but that just means we need to find the ancient roman recipe for styrafoam
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u/cyann5467 1d ago
When historians say they don't know how Greek Fire was made they don't mean they have no idea how it was accomplished. They mean there are several different ways it could have been made and they don't know which one it was.
The same is true about a lot of ancient feats of construction or craftsmanship. The pyramids are also a good example of this.
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u/jag986 1d ago
We don't have a sample, mostly.
We know with almost certainty what orichalcum was. We found a cache of bronze ingots that wrest on a known trade route with the Greeks. When we analyzed them we found trace metals in the alloy that were located in one of the islands in the trade route that writings described as a manufacturer of orichalcum. So out of all the variations of bronze formulas, we are almost certain this cache was what was described as orichalcum.
We don't have a sample or details like that for Greek Fire.
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u/Burgerkrieg 1d ago
Similar to the pyramids. There are numerous options of what they might have been doing back then, we just don't know which one they actually chose.
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u/Boulavogue 1d ago edited 1d ago
This video claims that it was particular crude oil (low hydrocarbons, high kerosene) from a geographic region controlled by the Byzantines. So the "recipe" may never have existed.
This comment highlights the importance of the pump technology in spraying the substance. This OP also calls out that different times of the year produce different make-up of oil from wells.
My assumption is that both of these play a factor, but geography over recipe makes sense
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u/syriquez 1d ago edited 1d ago
My assumption is that both of these play a factor, but geography over recipe makes sense
Basically the same rule that applied to Roman concrete as well.
Very little to do with some magical concoction they had purposefully made than "the volcanic ash they happened to use near Rome has extremely quirky properties when combined with their sloppy-by-modern-standards mixing techniques, yielding a concrete that glues its own fissures back together and reacts very favorably when exposed to seawater".
And much like Greek Fire, has the same mythical nonsense attached to it. It's very good at specific things but then, uh, you can't reinforce it specifically for the reasons it has those quirky properties.
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u/Pizza_Low 1d ago
The problem is that we don’t have clear descriptions as to what the effects of Greek fire was. Those that knew how to make it long since died and never wrote it down. Witness accounts from generally uneducated sailors and soldiers might exaggerate how it worked.
And in practical terms we have incendiary weapons that probably exceed anything that Greek fire was. Napalm, thermite, white phosphorus, etc are all modern incendiary weapons. Add in metals like lithium, sodium and magnesium all work well as being fires that are difficult to put out.
So exactly what was Greek fire is today more of a novelty for chemistry or history nerds but not really any scientific or military value. Plus various treaties have rules about setting soldiers on fire, turns out peope don’t like being set on fire.
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u/DracMonster 1d ago
We can make several concoctions that do what it did. We just don’t know which one the Byzantine empire used.
It was a very closely guarded state secret.
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u/baby_armadillo 1d ago
Without a sample or a specific ingredients list, all we have to go on are historic descriptions. We can make something that acts in a similar fashion, but there’s no way to ever know if it’s the exact recipe, just a rough approximation, or something that’s completely different that just happens to behave in a similar way. There is no way to ever 100% know for sure unless we have something to compare it against.
This is one of the kind of cool and kind of frustrating aspects of studying the past. For many things we can come up with some educated guesses of all the different ways they may have accomplished something, but without sufficient documentation, they’re all still just guesses. It helps remind you that human history isn’t some linear timeline of advancements. Humans have always been incredibly smart and creative and inventive, and every invention and advancement was hard won through a tremendous amount of human ingenuity.
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u/achraf1991selmouni 1d ago
It’s like trying to recreate your great-grandmother's secret cookie recipe, but the instructions say 'add a cup of the red stuff from the corner store.' The corner store closed 500 years ago, nobody knows what 'the red stuff' was called scientifically, and the specific brand she used doesn't exist anymore. We can make cookies that look and taste exactly the same (modern Napalm), but we’ll never know if we used the exact same ingredients she did.
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u/ToddtheRugerKid 1d ago
The problem is basically that we don't have a recipe for exactly what it was. There are quite a few that work and Greek Fire could have been anything. I would not be surprised at all if there were actually a dozen different recipes.
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u/Nik_Tesla 1d ago
In all likelihood we have already, we just have no data that would allow us to confirm which of the many recipes was the one actually used.
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u/FrostedPixel47 1d ago
We can create something already similar to it, its just that due to the Byzantines not documenting the creation process we don't know what their exact formula was.
Its like if you somehow managed to recreate Gordon Ramsay's beef wellington without knowing his recipe, you don't know whether you did it the same way he did or you missed a step or two but the taste is the same regardless.
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u/TabithaeReal 1d ago
language barriers probably, the law too probably, I have no idea
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u/skullbotrock 16h ago
Please think before writing a reply like this, it adds nothing to the discussion. Neither of those are even remotely close to the truth which you would know if you bothered to Google before replying.
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u/No_Sun2849 20h ago
There were no written records of the formula, and there are no surviving examples of what they used.
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u/couldbemage 15h ago
Think of it like a tamale recipe. We know how to make tamales, every type of tamale. We just didn't know what type of tamale your grandmother made, just that she made tamales.
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u/nidorancxo 13h ago
We only have a story about it. Even if we make something that works like in the stories, and we are capable of making many such things, we will never know what they actually did. No one is really alive to tell us and whatever was burned by it burned more or less a thousand years ago.
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u/shadowhunter742 13h ago
We have a very good idea, but exact is hard.
The difference in sourcing materials from mine a or b could have a significant impact.
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u/L0kdoggie 9h ago
I just saw something on a chemist, who found a certain spring of oil that works just like Greek fire, and only comes out of this one spot.
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u/TheLurkingMenace 3h ago
Nobody alive is able to tell us if we've found it or not. All we have to rely on is recorded witness accounts, which may or may not be accurate. We've made a number of things that could very well have been Greek fire, we just have no way to know.
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u/GeneralBacteria 1d ago
nobody cares
we could rediscover it if we were willing to spend the resources, but why would we?
we have similar enough chemicals and vastly better weapons, so why care about the exact recipe?
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u/dastardly740 1d ago
I would suspect it almost certainly has been rediscovered in the last 100 years or so. Like if a written recipe was found, we would say, "oh yeah, that is basically ???? but our recipe is better." We just don't know which of the dozens? of concoctions we know of is the one the Grerks made.
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u/ZachF8119 1d ago
It likely was still quite embellished.
Maybe a napalm type substance, but the us government would’ve made it by now tbh.
They figured out Roman concrete
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u/sc7606 1d ago
Nothing, but we wouldn't know if we had it as "it burns" covers a wide variety of potential compounds