The Origin of the Word Eureka!

At our heart is the trademark Eureka!. That's Eureka with an exclamation point because the name evokes energy. It also recognizes the phenomenal power of stimulus to activate new thoughts. It epitomizes the moment of inspiration; the instant in which something new is born.

Stimulus was, in fact, responsible for the creation of the word Eureka! In the original Greek, Eureka! means, "I have found it!" According to legend, the Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes coined the term after being stimulated in a hot tub.

He was settling in for a long soak one day around 250 B.C. At the time, he was preoccupied with finding a way to determine the proportion of real gold to ordinary metal in King Hieron's crown. See, the king thought he might have been shorted on the crown deal. He wanted to make sure the crown he was wearing was pure gold and not some cheap imitation. At the time, the weight of gold per unit volume was well known. But given the intricate nature of the crown's design, what with all its curly-cues and whatnot, it was impossible to measure its true gold content.

Anyway, as Archimedes was lowering himself into the tub, he noticed his bath water rising in proportion to his entry into the tub. The lower he sunk, the higher the water rose, until it overflowed.

The stimulus of the overflowing hot tub gave Archimedes a revelation. He suddenly realized he could measure the volume of the crown by simply dunking it in a tub filled to the brim, then measuring the water that overflowed.

He leaped from his tub and ran naked into the street hollering "Eureka!" Thus, in the white-hot grip of inspiration, Archimedes also invented streaking. And it didn't end there - the hot tub stimulus further led Archimedes to the discovery of the law of specific gravity and the general science of hydrostatics.