text: Burning glasses are known to date back to about 700 BC. One of the first accurately mentions of burning glasses appears in Aristophaness comedy, The Clouds, written in 423 BC. According to the Archimedes heat ray anecdote, Archimedes is purported to have developed mirrors to concentrate heat rays in order to burn attacking Roman ships during the Siege of Syracuse ( 213–212 BC), but no sources from the time have been confirmed. Catoptrics is a book attributed to Euclid on how to focus light in order to produce heat, but the book might have been written in 300 AD.