Author: The Fact Feed

The air is thick with the scent of burning incense. A line of worshippers stands in front of a curious bronze contraption. A man steps forward, drops a coin into the machine, and—like magic—holy water flows into his hands. No priest. No human interaction. Just a machine fulfilling a need, 2,000 years before the modern vending machine. Sounds like something from a sci-fi novel, right? But this was real. This was the work of Hero of Alexandria, a genius who built the world’s first vending machine in the first century AD. The Mind Behind the Machine: Who Was Hero of…