Antikythera Mechanism
In his famous research paper "Gears From The Greeks" historian Derek De Solla Price put forward a stunning theory regarding the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism. That the origins of our modern day engineering achievements, what he called our "recent age of High Technology", could be found in this ancient device.
He theorized that the profession of clock and instrument making had acted as a silent "carrier" of a larger, and much older technology tradition. Embedded in the daily output of clockmakers, were the fundamental elements of modern engineering, such as gearing, linkages, shafts and bearings. Some of the key elements that had led to The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and then everything that had followed. Clockmakers, he said, had played a crucial role in the emergence of our modern world, and that the clock making tradition itself, was part of a distinguished main line of technology that could be directly traced all of the way back to the Antikythera Mechanism.
The Ancient Greeks had written the original language of the mechanical engineer, and had left behind a record of it in this incredible device. A calculating machine, that used complex mathematics and precise engineering to model the Ancient Greek understanding of the Cosmos. A single input wheel drove a complex combination of gears, pins, slots, and pointers, so that the operator could directly compute and most importantly predict, the position of the naked eye celestial objects, the date and time of eclipses, and even some of the characteristics of those eclipses. The phase of the moon, retrograde motion of the planets, and even barely observable details like precession of the lunar orbit, were all modelled according to Ancient Greek astronomical theory. For our understanding of the history of science and technology, it is likely to be the single most important object that has ever been uncovered from ancient times.
THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM: DECODING THE WORLD'S FIRST COMPUTER
In 1900 a party of Greek sponge divers chanced on an ancient wreck near the tiny island of Antikythera, between Crete and the Greek mainland. The first ever major underwater archaeology subsequently recovered a spectacular array of ancient Greek treasure. The divers also found a corroded lump, not considered at all important at the time. Then the lump split apart revealing some tiny bronze gearwheels—a shocking discovery for ancient Greece. It was the beginning of an extraordinary voyage of discovery over more than a hundred years as its hidden identity has been gradually decoded. Tony Freeth presents the early research on the device as well as the remarkable progress of three Antikythera research pioneers—up to the point in 2005 when new scientific investigations were carried out at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Tom Malzbender then takes up the story by describing a remarkable surface-imaging technique that he invented, which became one of the key tools for investigating the Antikythera Mechanism. He also describes Microfocus X-Ray Computed Tomography (X-Ray CT), which yields high-resolution 3D X-rays. Both techniques were crucial for understanding the Antikythera Mechanism. Tony Freeth returns to reveal the remarkable breakthroughs that came from this new data. The Antikythera Mechanism has emerged as an astronomical calculating machine of spectacular sophistication: one of the wonders of the ancient world and a key landmark in the history of computing.
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