History of the anchor
aspect of history
The most ancient anchors were probably rocks and many rock anchors have been discovered originating from at least the Bronze Age. Many modern moorings remain reliant upon a large rock as the primary element of their design. However, using pure mass to resist the forces of a storm only works well as a permanent mooring; trying to move a large enough rock to another bay is nearly impossible.
The ancient Greeks used baskets of stones, large sacks filled with sand, and wooden logs filled with lead, which, according to Apollonius Rhodius and Stephen of Byzantium, were formed of stone; and Athenaeus states that they were sometimes made of wood. Such anchors held the vessel merely by their weight and by their friction along the bottom. Lashing tree branches to the stone formed teeth or "flukes", to fasten themselves into the bottom. Advances in woodworking and metallurgy encouraged development of improved shapes for more compact, durable, as well as efficient anchors.
Early designs
Killicks are primitive anchors formed by lashing tree branches to a stone for weight. Greeks were using mushroom anchors by 400 B.C. fashioned from a flattened stone with a hole drilled through the center and a triangular eyebolt at the crown for "tripping" the anchor out of its bed.
Roman iron anchors were in use from the republican period onwards.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of the anchor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.