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The Antikythera Mechanism has been featured a number of times on Neatorama, including a working model created in 2008. This year a fully functional replica has been created using Lego materials. Since gears with 19, 47, 127, and 223 teeth were not publicly available, a complex differential shaft had to be fashioned.
Two Nature videos about the original Antikythera Mechanism are available at The Guardian.
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We think we live in such modern times, with fabulous inventions that make our lives easier and provide great convenience. But some of those inventions might not be as modern as we think. Take a look at these five inventions that may have been around for thousands of years before we “invented” them.
A jet engine in the first century B.C.? Perhaps. A jet engine in the first century A.D.? Definitely. The aeolipile is a rocket style jet engine that spins when it’s heated and is the first-ever device known to use steam for a rotary motion. Although it was “invented” in 1698 by Thomas Savery, the original may have been invented in the first century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius’ De architectura, a work on then-modern architecture written around 25 B.C., includes a device called the aeolipile. However, it has never been verified that his aeolipile (which translates to “ball of Aeolus,” who was the god of the wind, so it’s kind of a generic name that could apply to various inventions) was the aeolipile that we know existed in the first century.
That’s the aeolipile that Hero of Alexander wrote about, including a detailed description of how to construct one. The invention credit is usually given to Hero instead of Vitruvius.
That Hero was a pretty smart guy. He also invented the vending machine long before we were prying Kit Kats out of them in our office break rooms. Hero rigged it so that when a coin was dropped into a slot, it fell on a pan, and the weight of it on the pan triggered a lever that opened up a valve that let some holy water flow out to the person who dropped the coin in. The pan kept tilting until the coin fell off of it, and when that happened the valve closed and the water would no longer dispense. The first modern-day vending machine came about in the 1880s, so you could say that Hero was well ahead of his time.
We’ve long thought that the first astronomical clocks didn’t show up until the 14th century in Europe. That all changed in 1900 when a group of divers discovered shipwreck thought to date back to 150-100 BC. A lot of the loot was stuff you might expect from that era – statues, busts, instruments and utensils. But then one of the divers spotted what looked like a gear stuck in a rock, which was eventually found to be just one of many pieces of the same thing. Upon closer inspection and much analysis (decades of analysis, in fact), it was determined that the gear and its 80+ other pieces were part of a complicated mechanism that precisely calculated the position of the sun, moon, planets and other astronomical information. It was capable of predicting an eclipse right down to the hour that it would occur. Astronomer John Seiradakis has called it the “pocket calculator of its time.” Its construction was so perfect and exact that many historians and archaeologists believe that the Antikythera Mechanism was just one of many similar devices – we just haven’t discovered the other ones yet.
Here’s curator Michael Wright with his working replica of the Antikythera Mechanism – it’s pretty interesting stuff. Photo from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
We’re not sure about this one – it’s just a theory. But there is some speculation that the ancient Egyptians may have understood how to harness electricity. The entire argument is based on stone reliefs inside the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt. What the etching appears to depict, to some, are bulbs, filaments and insulators. It also looks like a lotus flower and a snake. The argument could probably stop there – obviously humans are programmed to spot patterns in things and could easily see a now-everyday object in an ancient etching when it’s really not there. But English scientist J.N. Lockyer (he discovered helium) pointed out that the tombs were conspicuously soot-free – if Egyptians were using candles or torches, there would no doubt be some evidence of it on the walls or ceilings. But there is no evidence. A lot of people believe that the Egyptians used a series of mirrors to reflect the sunlight into the temple, but others say that their mirrors were too weak to do any such thing. Thus, the argument continues. What do you think? Photo from Wikipedia user Liftarn.
Along the same line as the Dendera Temple light is the Baghdad Battery. In the mid-1930s, a number of artifacts thought to date back to 200 BC were found in Khuyut Rabbou’a, a village near Baghdad. The combination of objects – a five-inch long clay jar and a copper cylinder that encased an iron rod – led researchers to believe that the ancient artifacts were actually used as batteries. Batteries for what, we still don’t know. Unlike the Dendera light though, there’s some evidence that these really were batteries – replicas have been made that did, in fact, conduct an electric current, sometimes as much as two volts. One theory is that the batteries were hidden inside of idols to give tiny little shocks to people, scaring people who didn’t understand the trick and often forcing them to give up secrets or confess to crimes. Photo from the BBC.
The following is a guest blog post
by Jo Marchant, author
of Decoding
the Heavens
Main fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism (Photo: Jo Marchant)
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek clockwork computer that has lain at the bottom of the sea for two thousand years. I first came across it in late summer 2006, when a major paper describing its workings was due to appear in the science journal Nature, where I was on staff as an editor.
The story grabbed me immediately. If such a sophisticated device really existed, what did it do? Who could have made it? And why?
I travelled to Greece to see the remains of the device (on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens) and find out more about it. The modern part of its story begins in autumn 1900, when Captain Dimitrios Kontos and his crew of sponge divers were sailing home from their summer diving grounds of the coast of Tunisia. They were heading for the island of Symi in the eastern Mediterranean but were blown off course by a storm, and took shelter by a barren islet called Antikythera.
When the waters had calmed, one of the divers dropped down to look for sponges but soon emerged, gabbling about a heap of "dead, naked women" on the seabed. These turned out to be not corpses but statues, from one of the most spectacular shipwrecks ever discovered from the ancient world - a Roman ship carrying stolen Greek treasures west to Rome.
Among the salvaged hoard subsequently shipped to Athens was a piece of formless rock that no one noticed at first, until it cracked open, revealing bronze gearwheels, pointers, and tiny Greek inscriptions. It has taken more than a century of ingenious labour to fully decode this mechanism (during which it was largely ignored by mainstream historians) but scholars now know that it represents by far the most stunning scientific artefact that survives from antiquity. A sophisticated piece of machinery consisting of precisely cut dials, pointers and at least thirty interlocking gear wheels, nothing close to its complexity appears again in the historical record for more than a thousand years, until the development of astronomical clocks in medieval Europe.
Radiograph of the major fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism
(Images: Antikythera
Mechanism Research PRoject)
The mechanism was encased in a wooden box, about the size of a squat dictionary, and operated by a handle on the side. Its purpose was to calculate the motions of celestial bodies. A large Zodiac dial on the front had several revolving pointers that represented the Sun, Moon and planets moving around the sky. Complex epicyclic gearing (in which wheels ride around on other wheels) was used to model the Greeks' latest astronomical theories, in order to display the variable speed of the Sun and Moon as seen from Earth as well as the wandering motions of the planets. Meanwhile on the back of the device were two spiral dials - one was a sophisticated 19-year calendar, developed to unify the motions of the Sun and the Moon, while the other displayed the timing of eclipses.
By turning the handle on the box you could make time pass forwards or backwards, to see the state of the cosmos today, tomorrow, last Tuesday or a hundred years in the future. Whoever owned this device must have felt like master of the heavens.
The mechanism dates to around 100 BC. It's not clear exactly where it was made, but the choices are limited as by this time the Romans had taken over most of the Mediterranean region, so Greek scientists weren't able to work freely. One possible source is Rhodes, where the shipwrecked vessel had stopped off shortly before its demise. Hipparchus, one of the greatest astronomers of the ancient world, lived on Rhodes in the second century BC, and his theory describing the varying speed of the Moon is beautifully captured within the mechanism's gearing. On the other hand, the calendar on the device incorporates month names that may be from Syracuse in Sicily, home to the famous mathematician Archimedes in the third century BC. Perhaps he first came up with the idea of using bronze gears to model the universe.
One
question that has always intrigued me about the Antikythera mechanism
is why the Greeks would have built such a machine. A clue may be found
in the writings of Cicero, a Roman lawyer and author who lived in the
first century BC. On a couple of occasions, he described "bronze
spheres" that modelled the daily movements of the Sun, Moon and
planets as seen from Earth. According to Cicero, Archimedes made one of
these in the third century BC, while he attributed the other to a philosopher
called Posidonius, who worked on Rhodes in the first century BC. Cicero
gave no details of how these devices worked so historians haven't
taken these stories very seriously - they figured the Greeks couldn't
have been capable of building such complex machines. After all, until
the sponge divers' discovery, archaeologists had never found a single
gearwheel from the ancient world. But now that we know the Antikythera
mechanism was exactly such a model, it seems likely that Cicero's
account was accurate.
For both Cicero and Posidonius, these devices were of religious and philosophical importance. Cicero wrote about them to make the argument that just as it would be clear to anyone that they had a intelligent creator, so then did the universe itself. And Posidonius belonged to the Stoic school of philosophy, meaning that for him God was a divine life force that pervaded the entire universe. He would have seen astronomy and astronomical models as a way to understand and demonstrate the workings of the cosmos, and therefore to get closer to God.
The Greeks have often been dismissed by historians for wasting the technology they had on toys such as vending machines or automated puppet shows, instead of using it to tell the time or do useful work. Yet their most advanced creation, the Antikythera mechanism, was about demonstrating scientific principles and understanding the nature of the universe - and elevating one's spirit in the process. To me, that doesn't seem such a waste.
Recreation of the antikythera by Michael Wright, narrated by Jo [YouTube
Link]
_____
Jo
Marchant is a freelance journalist specializing in science and history,
and author of Decoding
the Heavens
You can learn more about the Antikythera mechanism on Jo's website, her article at New Scientist, or on Wikipedia.
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