Original subtitles

[narrator] Could this ancient Middle Eastern relic really produce electricity?

[Dr. Mark Altaweel] How could they have batteries almost 1,700 years

before batteries existed?

[narrator] Why is this 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy screaming?

This person is being denied an afterlife for eternity.

This is a huge deal.

[narrator] And is this medieval device the hand of the world's first iron man?

To the untrained eye, it just looks like a gauntlet on a suit of armor.

This is something far, far stranger

and more technologically advanced.

[narrator] These are the most remarkable and mysterious objects on earth

hidden away in museums, laboratories and storage room.

Now, new research and technology

can get under their skin like never before.

We can rebuild them, pull them apart,

and zoom in to reveal the unbelievable,

the ancient and the truly bizarre.

These are the world's strangest things.

This priceless 2,000-year-old relic

is the only one of its kind in the world.

Since it was unearthed in Baghdad in 1936,

it's become infamous

as one of the most controversial finds of all time.

For nearly 70 years, it was stored in an Iraqi museum.

Now, it's gone.

In 2003, during the Iraq War,

Baghdad Museum was plundered, and it went missing.

[narrator] But using the best available data, we've brought it back.

Just six inches tall.

At first glance, it looks like a dusty old jar...

but opening it up reveals something intriguing...

a tube of copper and an iron rod.

And in between the two, you had this bitumen plug that separated the two items.

[narrator] The archaeologist who finds it

is struck by a similarity in this combination of parts,

not to anything from the ancient world, but something from the modern.

He basically, right there on the spot,

thought that it may have been a battery...

Which is kind of a crazy-sounding idea

for something that's 2,000 years old.

[narrator] Accepted history says the first-known battery

won't be invented until 1799.

How could they have batteries 1,700 years before

when actually batteries existed?

[narrator] It becomes known as the Baghdad Battery.

No other jar like this has ever been found.

What is it for?

And could it really be an ancient electrical device?

Why would an archaeologist identify it as a battery in the first place?

One of the challenges that we have in interpreting the past

is that we do have a kind of natural inclination

to bring our own frames of reference to what we're seeing.

So it doesn't surprise me that something unusual like this

might have been interpreted as a battery.

[Dr. Altaweel] Most scholars were very skeptical.

As an archaeologist, I would sort of test an idea,

um, see if it's possible or feasible.

If it's not, then I would discount it and say, "Okay, it's not that."

[narrator] So the first question is,

can it actually function as a battery at all?

[Dr. Anna Ploszajski] A battery like this has three main components.

There are two electrodes made of metal

called the anode and the cathode.

And the substance in between those is called an electrolyte.

Electrolytes are liquids that allow for the flow of charged particles

between the two electrodes.

In a battery, it would commonly be an acidic liquid.

[narrator] The copper and the iron in this ancient relic

look strikingly like modern electrodes.

And that's not the only similarity.

What's really exciting is that there's evidence of an acidic solution inside.

As well as this, the electrodes show evidence of corrosion,

which is exactly what we would expect to find inside a battery.

[narrator] So, it seems to have all the right parts,

but can it actually make electricity?

Scientific research has finally tested this idea.

People have done a reconstruction of the Baghdad Battery

and found that because of the chemistry and the materials involved,

it kind of can't help but be a battery, which is really cool.

[narrator] So, quite remarkably,

the evidence suggests it really does work.

But is this an accidental effect

or are its makers actually trying to create electricity?

Back in the third century, this region of Mesopotamia

is at the heart of the Sasanian Empire.

And for the time, the people who live here

certainly have a sophisticated culture.

The capital city of Ctesiphon is a vast metropolis

of a quarter of a million people.

[Dr. Altaweel] One of the remains of Ctesiphon is this large arch

that you see if you go outside of Baghdad.

So, clearly, the Sasanians were a very sophisticated society

of very developed engineers.

[narrator] If any civilization in this period is going to invent a battery,

the Sasanians sound like a good prospect.

In fact, one of the most ancient universities was built by the Sasanians.

Um, they had an ancient school

that brought scholars from India, from Rome,

from the Greek world, uh, to basically conduct science.

[narrator] If the Sasanians really do create this mysterious object,

what is it for?

One theory suggests its electrical charge

could be used for plating metal.

To do this, you put metal objects that you want to coat

in a precious material into a vat

of really nasty chemicals that contain gold, for example.

When you pass a current through that solution,

then the gold atoms stick to the metals that you want to plate.

And what you ends up with is a really thin layer of gold onto the metal surface.

[narrator] And there's no shortage

of gold-plated objects from this period to support this idea.

Plating gold, particularly on things like silver, or other metals,

was very typical.

Uh, gold, of course, was highly precious,

highly desired, but was also very expensive.

So you often would put a plate of gold on another item

to make it look like the entire item's made of gold

to give it that, kind of, gold shine.

[narrator] But there are some issues with this theory.

[Dr. Ploszajski] The problem with the electroplating theory is that you would have needed

a lot of Baghdad Batteries to power it, and we've only found one.

[narrator] There's an even bigger problem.

The Sasanians already know how to plate gold.

It was a different process that was much better known

and much easier to do called fire gilding,

which would have achieved the same effect

of plating these metal objects with gold.

In fire gilding, what you do is

you create an alloy out of gold and mercury.

You apply that to the metal surface, and then you heat it up,

which boils away the mercury into the air

to leave the gold on the surface.

This is a ridiculously dangerous process,

and would have been extremely bad

for the health of everyone involved

in doing this fire gilding process.

So, we know that now, but they probably didn't know that back then.

[narrator] The electroplating theory doesn't hold up,

and there's an even more bizarre idea.

Could this strange object have been for childbirth?

The Baghdad Battery, a mysterious ancient device

that produces an electric charge.

What is it for?

There's been one argument that the device

may have been used for a kind of electrotherapy.

Uh, the idea of using electricity to numb the pain,

perhaps in childbirth, labor.

We do this in the modern world.

[narrator] Surprisingly, using electricity in this way is not a new idea.

There are ancient texts from the ancient Greek world,

uh, the use of electric rays, for instance.

Electricity derived from animals

that could be used to numb the pain for individuals.

So that's indicating there is a precedent for this, uh...

potential use to the battery for that purpose.

[narrator] The problem with this theory is that there was no shortage,

of pain relief in this part of the world already.

Almost 2,000 years before this jar...

would have been made,

you had text discussing the use of things.

Probably comparable to opium or even cannabis.

Used to numb pain.

So, medicinal uses of different plants,

would have been a well established practice, in this part of the world.

[narrator] So probably not a miracle pain relief.

Their seemed to be flaws in every ancient battery theory.

Maybe the answer is it's not a battery at all.

The form and shape of the Baghdad battery, is a very common shape.

Very common looking jar, very plainly decorated.

Such jars were often used to contain scrolls, parchment effectively.

[narrator] But if this jar is designed to hold scrolls,

why is there acid residue inside it?

And why the copper tube and iron rod?

Any theory has to explain the function of all four key elements.

[Dr. Altaweel] You have the liquid inside the jar.

You had the jar itself.

The two items the rod and the cylinder.

The fact that they're made of specific metals.

You had iron and copper.

So you had to come up with a solution,

that effectively brings it all together.

Now there is a new idea,

one that could explain everything.

A new and very exciting...

theory about the Baghdad battery,

is that it could have been used in the brewing of beer.

When you ferment yeast to create beer,

it also makes substances like hydrogen sulphide.

This is a really smelly and disgusting material.

You can smell it near volcanoes.

It sort of smells like rotten eggs,

and you really don't want that in your beer.

So, today we take hydrogen sulphide out of beer,

using electrochemical processes.

[Dr. Altaweel] In modern beer making,

copper barrels are often used,

to remove smell and impurities from beer,

so potentially the Baghdad battery

is used for a similar purpose.

To get rid of the hydrogen sulphide from beer,

what you can do is put a copper electrode...

into the beer and apply a voltage to it.

When you do that, the hydrogen sulfide in the beer,

reacts with the copper to produce a solid material,

which just floats to the bottom of the vat,

which you can then easily remove,

which gets rid of your hydrogen sulphide.

And it's possible that the Baghdad battery was used,

for the same process back then.

[narrator] But did the Sasanians really care enough about beer,

to go to this much effort?

Beer was a big deal and had been for a long time.

We know of brewing in Iraq, from 3500 BCE,

and possibly even older than that.

Beer was a very common beverage,

in this part of the world for a long time,

perhaps even preferred beverage,

but it was also full of impurities.

And so, perhaps creating something that could diminish those impurities,

would have been an innovation that would be desired by this period.

[narrator] After 70 years of controversy,

do we finally have an explanation, for this strange object?

So I guess the question is,

could the Baghdad battery have actually been part of a Baghdad brewery?

Well, the beer is acidic,

so yeah, that would work as the electrolytes.

The copper and the iron together create the voltage.

The copper can take the hydrogen sulphide out of the beer.

And we also see that corrosion on the electrodes.

So, yes, it could have worked in this way.

[narrator] But like every theory about the Baghdad battery,

there's a snag.

There's only one problem with this brewery theory,

which is that the Baghdad battery itself is extremely small.

So, if it was used for brewing beer,

it would have been the world's first craft beer.

[narrator] Right now, proving this idea is impossible.

Because the battery is still missing.

Unless it's recovered,

this new theory can't be properly tested.

For now, at least, the Baghdad battery,

remains one of the world's most perplexing, unexplained objects.

Locked away in a Cairo museum,

is one of the strangest Egyptian relics in history.

Unlike the thousands of other mummies,

unearthed from the sands of Egypt,

that seem calm and composed,

this one appears to be a snapshot, of the true horror of death.

Now the body has been removed from its coffin,

and painstakingly reconstructed.

This is the Screaming Mummy.

People think that the Screaming Mummy is screaming in agony,

you know, it looks really horrific.

[narrator] Even the gold earrings lost after the body was discovered,

have been digitally restored.

They're definitely not the jewelry of a peasant.

His body tells a similar story.

His hair was braided. He had henna on.

All of this actually suggests that what we have here is a man of extreme status.

[narrator] Yet this emaciated body,

looks nothing like other high status Egyptian mummies.

"Normal" mummies would be wrapped in linen bandages,

which were symbolically important.

It's really shocking that this mummy is not.

And his hands and feet looked like they were tied up.

[Dr. Rebecca] Why was he buried in this really disturbing manner?

[narrator] Who is he?

Why is he screaming?

Now, the latest scientific analysis can reveal not only his identity,

but the truth behind his gruesome demise.

The Screaming Mummy is discovered in the late 19th century.

Near Egypt's legendary Valley of the Kings,

and he isn't found alone.

Basically, this was a discovery of a cache of mummies.

So there were about 40 in there, most of them richly decorated,

with coffins and sarcophagi and things like that.

Some of the mummies in this cache,

are actually quite well known, what we might say,

household names from ancient Egypt.

So, for example, Ramses II.

[narrator] Ramses II ruled for more than 60 years,

and is considered one of ancient Egypt's greatest pharaohs.

So this certainly wasn't just a group of unimportant people,

but rather a bringing together,

of some of the biggest names in ancient Egypt.

[narrator] But inside one of the coffins,

archaeologists make a shocking discovery.

So when they opened up the lid of the coffin,

they were really surprised to find, the body of a young man.

His face was contorted in what seems like agony.

[narrator] With no clue to his identity,

archaeologists label him "Unknown Man E,"

What is this macabre body doing amongst such exalted company?

Forensic analysis just adds to the mystery.

You don't see any calluses, no thick skin.

The person had beautiful earrings, fingernails were manicured.

Person was in good health, as far as we could see.

[narrator] This is not a man who works for his living.

Combined with the location of his burial.

This suggests he is a member of ancient Egypt's ruling elite.

But there's a problem with that theory.

His simple wooden coffin looks nothing like the others.

[Dr. Rebecca] It's not highly decorated,

so really, this is a huge question,

why is this man of high status being buried,

in this completely plain coffin?

[narrator] Worse still, it doesn't record his name.

This is almost unheard of in elite burials.

This is not a small thing for the ancient Egyptians.

Names were tied intrinsically, to your body.

So if you wanted to have a successful transition, into the afterlife,

you needed to have your body intact,

and part of that was having a recognizable name.

[narrator] Everything about Egyptian burials,

is to assist your journey after death.

[Dr. Rebecca] If you were buried properly,

the idea would be that you could go into the afterlife.

You could be in the Field of Reeds,

which was at the ancient Egyptian conception of what we might call heaven,

and you lived a life of paradise.

[narrator] The nameless coffin sends a stark message.

The implication of burying someone without their name,

is huge when it comes to ancient Egyptian theology.

This really means that this person is being denied, an afterlife for eternity.

This is a huge deal.

[narrator] The other essential component of a successful journey

into the afterlife is mummification.

Mummification was an extremely elaborate process.

You would start by removing by removing the brain and the internal organs,

um, washing the body and cleansing it with salt.

[narrator] But a forensic examination of the corpse

reveals something even more shocking than the nameless coffin.

[Dr. Mark] If you look at the skull of the mummy,

you see that the brain is still there.

That is very unusual because the brain should have been removed.

[narrator] The abdomen of the body is also unmarked,

suggesting the other organs are still in place.

[Dr. Mark] And that is something...

Especially for a person from a very high social rank,

that's something that I've never seen before.

[narrator] And the material covering the corpse

is completely out of place for a high status burial.

It's really shocking that this mummy is wrapped

not in linen but in a sheepskin.

I've seen a lot of mummies, but none was ever wrapped into a skin

of an animal that has a bad meaning,

or an unclean meaning like a sheep.

So that is something that is very, very unusual,

and very offensive for that person.

[Dr. Rebecca] So if we bring all of this together,

the fact that there's no name on the coffin,

the fact that he was wrapped in sheep skin,

and the fact that his organs weren't removed.

This all adds up to the idea

that someone has done this intentionally,

and that this man is being completely denied

a chance of living in the afterlife.

[narrator] A member of the elite buried in a royal tomb.

His body treated with contempt, his soul damned to oblivion.

Who is this cursed man?

[narrator] The screaming Mummy,

a 3,000-year-old unidentified corpse twisted in agony.

For nearly 130 years,

the identity of Unknown Man E remains a mystery.

Now, 21st century forensics have been brought to bare on the body.

In the late 2000s, an Egyptian archeologist named Zahi Hawass

commissioned a number of DNA analyses.

What these analyses tell us is that

he was the son of one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs, Ramses III.

Ramses III is quite a big deal in ancient Egyptian history.

He had a number of military campaigns that he oversaw,

and he built on an incredibly prolific scale.

To some Egyptologists, he's actually the last of the great pharaohs.

[narrator] If the Screaming Mummy is the son of a living God,

what can he have done to deserve this terrible fate?

An ancient document located two 2,000 miles away

in Turin, northern Italy, might hold the key.

It's known as the Judicial Papyrus.

It seems to record the trial of a number of people

who are high up in the court for conspiracy to assassinate Ramses III.

The pharaohs in ancient Egypt were able to marry a number of wives,

however many they liked, really.

And these wives would usually be ranked.

The Judicial Papyrus actually talks about a lesser queen

whose name was T, um, and the fact that she had managed

to recruit a huge number of courtiers, people of real power.

[narrator] The Papyrus claims that this lesser queen,

a wife of Ramses III plotted to murder him.

And it goes on to suggest that Queen T had created this conspiracy

in order to put her own son on the throne.

And that son's name was Pentawere.

[narrator] The story recorded in this ancient document

is a dark tale of conspiracy and murder.

One that might finally reveal the identity of the Screaming Mummy.

From the DNA test, we know that this is one of the sons of Ramses III.

And we also know that he was buried in disgrace.

So if we put that together, there's only one solution.

This must be Prince Pentawere.

[narrator] There's one problem with this theory.

Other than the Papyrus, the name Pentawere appears

absolutely nowhere else in ancient Egypt.

There's a very real possibility that Pentawere wasn't his real name.

And that actually this is a pseudonym used specifically

so that his real name wouldn't be said

because the action of saying someone's name gives him life.

[narrator] The Screaming Mummy may have been at the center

of a treasonous plot.

But did the plot succeed?

On the one hand, we have the Judicial Papyrus,

at which Ramses III, seems to be opening proceedings

and presiding over the entire trial.

However, he is referred to as the Great God,

which is often a title reserved for people who were dead.

So the Judicial Papyrus doesn't actually give us a firm answer

as to whether the plot against Ramses III was successful or not.

[narrator] In 2007,

Ramses III's mummy is scanned using 21st century CT technology.

The results are shocking.

Under the linen, which was carefully placed and arranged there,

there was a deep wound stretching from the front back to the spine,

and that means that the veins here on his the sides of the neck

were cut.

And that means the brain doesn't get any oxygen and you die instantly.

Meaning that he was assassinated.

[Dr. Rebecca] As the most important man in ancient Egypt,

there is no doubt that the Pharaoh would have been extremely, closely guarded.

And this suggests that anyone who got to him

may have been someone close to him.

[narrator] Someone like a son.

Which may explain why Pentawere is damned to oblivion.

By killing this person who is seen to be a living God,

you are committing the most heinous crime possible.

The conspirators who were found guilty of being part of this plot

actually were handed out some pretty heavy duty sentences.

[narrator] 28 of them are sentenced to death.

Royal members of the plot are ordered to commit suicide.

Is this the fate of the Screaming Mummy?

On the withered corpse is one final clue.

[Dr. Mark] You see kind of indentations on the wrists,

that means that the person was probably or most likely restrained before death

because you even find pieces of leather inside of the tongue.

So, I mean, why would the person be restrained?

The fact that his hands were bound does suggest that if this was suicide,

it was probably more likely to be assisted suicide.

[narrator] We know his name and his fate.

One final question remains.

Why is he screaming?

Why is this mummy screaming?

It turns out he's not alone.

Screaming Mummies exist everywhere.

You see some Screaming Mummies in Sicily, in Italy,

in the middle and Southern America.

Wherever you see mummies, you often see a scream.

[narrator] But are they really screaming at all?

The Screaming Mummy looks as if it was screaming

because it is poorly prepared.

This was... this is not done with love.

In most cases, when mummies are produced,

the lower jaw is bound so that it doesn't open up.

if you bind find the jaw,

then you have joints over here and over there on both sides

and then your lower jaw will just drop.

And that obviously looks as if you were screaming.

So it's just an accidental thing that happens

by gravitational forces.

[narrator] The reason he appears to be screaming

says as much about us as it does about the Egyptians.

It is completely normal that we see emotions,

facial expressions in a face of a living or dead body.

This is because our brain is just hard-wired in a way,

because it is absolutely necessary to very quickly find out

which emotion another person to react properly.

[narrator] When we see a face with a gaping mouth,

its head thrown backwards,

our brains instantly compare it to what we know.

And the closest resemblance to Pentawere's face, is a scream.

[screaming sound]

So it seems this corpse isn't actually screaming.

But that doesn't stop the face from looking profoundly disturbing.

[narrator] Locked forever in an expression of agonizing torment.

[narrator] In a glass cabinet in Jagsthausen Castle

deep in the German countryside,

lies one of the world's most incredible objects.

To the untrained eye, it just looks like a gauntlet you might see on a suit of armor.

This is something far, far stranger and more technologically advanced.

[narrator] Now painstakingly reconstructing it

using cutting edge imaging technology...

reveals it in forensic detail.

It's a 500-year-old medieval marvel,

a mechanical iron hand with a seven inch long cuff,

the only one of its kind in the world.

Its fingers are fully articulated,

and inside is a complex mechanism of cods and springs.

Its owner, Gotz Von Berlichingen made extravagant claims for this device.

The iron hands allows him to hold a glass,

wield a sword, ride a horse and all these things

made you like pretty manly and active and virile.

[narrator] It sounds fantastic, but maybe that's all it is.

Because Gotz has a well earned reputation

as a man given to wild and extravagant claims.

At the end of the day, people thought, is it all true what he's writing there?

Does this hand really properly work?

[narrator] Why was this device built?

Did it really work?

And who was the man with the iron hand?

He lives in 15th century Germany.

It is a brutal, violent place.

The Germanic area

was divided up into dozens of little principalities.

[Ruth Goodman] Some of them were ruled by princess and by Duke's.

They're all at each other's throats all time

trying to get their bit bigger than somebody else's.

It's enormously chaotic, you know.

The same political situation isn't in place

more than about three weeks before, Bing, it's all changed again.

[narrator] This is the world in which Gotz Von Berlichingen lives.

He was born in 1480, and he was a knight by the age of 17.

At the age of 20, he became a freelancer, so to speak.

[narrator] Gotz may be called a knight,

but in reality he's an infamous mercenary.

He had his own gang and he was a weapon to hire.

Anybody could hire the gang and then they would go there and fight for that person.

And he was killing people and robbing people and making money out of that.

[narrator] Then, at the age of 24, it all goes wrong for him.

In 1504, Gotz is fighting for a Bavarian Duke.

And during one of the battles, a cannonball hits his arm

and slices of his hand and a part of his arm.

[narrator] Before antibiotics, such wounds are often fatal.

Gotz is in luck.

He survives. But he loses his right forearm and hand.

It seems his days as a fighting knight are over.

Whilst Gotz is in bed being ill.

He's not giving up.

He's trying to figure something out.

He wants to continue to do his job, so he designs a new arm and hand

for himself to grab a weapon, and two continue to kill.

[narrator] He certainly isn't the first person

to come up with the idea of artificial body parts.

I think there's a general idea that prosthetics

haven't been around for that long.

[Dr. Rebecca] There are a couple of really good examples from ancient Egypt,

the best of which is probably a prosthetic toe

that was designed to go onto the right toe of a noble woman.

It's really amazing. It's made of wood and leather.

It has a hinge so that it can move with her,

fits movement more easily, and it has a nice leather strap for comfort we think.

[narrator] Even the Romans get in on the act.

Pliny the Elder describes a man who he finds to be incredibly heroic.

His name is Marcus Sergius Silus.

He is famous for having his arm cut off in battle

and refusing to step down,

and he actually had an iron bit added onto his arm,

the shield's side arm,

to hold up a shield so that he could continue fighting.

He was on horse numerous times.

He went on to fight numerous battles.

[narrator] But Gotz has a vision of something far more sophisticated.

Gotz goes to a blacksmith and really tries to find something that works,

not just a hook or a wooden stump or something,

but something that really allows him to continue to function and to work.

[narrator] Two years after losing his hand,

Gotz is back on the battlefield with a metal prosthetic.

But he's not satisfied with his first attempt.

First one was still rather relatively remarkable

and that it would open and close,

but more of a binary on and off sort of grip.

But the second version is truly remarkable.

[narrator] What Gotz comes up with

appears to be a uniquely sophisticated iron hand.

If you must have taken to his blacksmith, it was pretty incredible.

He wanted to have each individual digits fully articulated,

and he wanted to be able to hold a sword and take it into battle.

That is a pretty incredible list of demands

to take to a 16th century blacksmith.

[narrator] It sounds astonishing,

and Gotz certainly tells everyone it is.

But does it actually work?

Now new research can finally answer that question.

[narrator] Gotz Von Berlichingen's 500-year-old iron hand

is a masterpiece of medieval engineering.

Challenge of building a prosthetic hand is having a combination

of being able to move and adapt the grip.

But then, actually, when you're ready to hold it, it actually have it fixed

into a very robust mechanical hold say, especially in the case of guts.

If he's holding a sword for the reign of a horse,

he needs for that to be a very tight grip.

[narrator] To understand just how clever Gotz's hand is,

you need to look at the mechanisms inside it.

The key is a ratchet and Paul system.

A ratchet has a series of teeth.

A paul falls into each tooth as it rotates,

and because of the shape of the teeth,

the paul prevents the joint going backwards.

To do that, the paul has to be lifted clear.

It's exactly the same mechanism still found in handcuffs.

In the iron hand, each finger contains three of these mechanisms

that can lock every knuckle joint in place.

So Gotz can use his good hand

to push the metal fingers around an object until the grip is tight enough.

The ratchet and paul keeps it that way.

Pressing a small button on the side of the hand

disengages the paul and releases the ratchets allowing the hand to open.

Another button on the back allows the hand to pivot at the risk joint.

Gotz tells everyone how fantastic his new hand is.

Gotz claimed that his new hand and arm rendered more service in the fight,

then did his original hand and arm out of flesh and bone.

[narrator] The problem with Gotz is that he is famously economical

with the truth.

He would write a beautiful autobiography

and of course which only show the best of him.

He would not tell about murder and rubbing people all the time,

but he would always see that he's, you know, presented in a good light.

[narrator] So can Gotz really hold a glass, grip the reins of his horse

and wield a sword, as he claims?

Over the last 500 years, there's been no shortage of doubters.

Now new research can finally settle it once and for all.

The University of Offenburg, they studied the design of the hand.

[narrator] The research has started with his simpler mark one hand.

Actually used 3D printing technology to replicate the design.

And part of what that study demonstrated was the extremes

that the hand was able to achieve from relatively robust grips

that would be used, say, in a battle

all the way to the more fine finely dexterous applications,

such as holding a pen.

[narrator] The mark one hand contains many of the key technologies

that Gotz refines in the Mark II.

So based on this research, it seems Gotz isn't boasting.

His mechanical hand really does work.

This is effectively a 500-year-old,

almost fully functioning mechanical, prosthetic iron hand.

[narrator] Perhaps the proof of just how well it works

is the life Gotz lives.

After losing his hands, Gotz continues to live for 58 years,

and his work was blundering, murdering and, you know,

drinking, gambling, so his hands quite obviously worked very well.

[narrator] Gotz has become a German folk hero,

and it's all because of something that happened

two hundred years after his death.

Gotz would probably not be known

if German national poet Goethe would not have put him

in to one of his plays, very famous play.

In this play, Gotz is quoted as saying in German,

[speaking in German] which roughly translates

into "Kiss my ass," but actually it's much worse.

[narrator] Gotz's iron hand is centuries ahead of its time,

a fully functioning medieval prosthetic.

The latest state of the art, electronic prosthetics

appear to have moved on a long way from Gotz's cranks and levers.

Neuro musculoskeletal prostheses

connect the prosthetic directly into the user's nerves,

muscles and skeleton.

Through the use of electrodes,

it's even possible for the wearer to control a prosthetic with their mind.

Gotz's iron hand seems like a relic of the distant past.

But the researchers who test his design don't agree.

They believe it could have far reaching consequences

for people all around the world.

Cases like Gotz's are still relevant today

because of the cost of prosthetics.

And so especially in and some geographies,

that just can't afford some of the most advanced prosthetics.

So systems like Gotz is good still be very, very useful.

[narrator] So, ironically, it's possible in the future

there may be people around the world

who will owe a huge debt of gratitude

to a man who made a very successful career out of robbery and murder.

If Gotz knew this was going to happen,

he'd probably have put it in his autobiography.

Anything to make him sound good.