Ancient Greeks had a sophisticated understanding of astronomy, and math. The Antikythera Mechanism is a gadget for demonstrating their knowledge, much like our planetariums and more advanced children’s educational toys.
Clickspring has spent years rebuilding one. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2
Rebuilding with period-correct tools and techniques. At least, as best as can be pulled together based on archaeology and the scant documentation we have from the time. The videos make it very clear where he’s taking license and where he’s not, which makes his already top-shelf presentation style that much more entertaining.
This project has also taken forever due to our host taking breaks to work with people on actual peer-reviewed publications about all this. It’s really an enormous project that is contributing to the intersection of engineering and archaeology in profound ways.
Such a good series, I could watch it for hours
it’s just an astrolabe. a very old one sure, but it’s always silly to me seeing all the various descriptions of this thing in these articles over the 20 years or so I’ve been seeing it posted. it’s not a computer either. or a calculator. it’s just a very old astrolabe for navigating at sea.
It’s a computer in the computus sense
it’s a bit more mechanically complex than that, it can predict moon phases and eclipses for an entire 19-year metonic cycle. the leading theories right now is that it was a prestige job, an expensive gift made by a master craftsman to show off. the clickspring video series linked in the thread is a really interesting look into it, especially since Chris who runs the channel straight up took a break from building the thing for a year to join a research project about the historical context of the mechanism at his local university.
The consensus seems to be that there might have been many devices like it but they were not super accurate and very expensive. The people who owned them would not exactly tell and it’s still very impressive.
Even steam powered motion existed and was considered a party trick.
No reason to develop steam if you have tons of slaves.
We’re about to lose our scientific knowledge to stupidity and barbarism too. History keeps repeating.
Not only that but one can 3D print one! For example: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1821540#google_vignette
Proof the ancient Greek had 3d printers
LoL! TY for that!
