April 24, 2021 • 23 mins
Today we revisit a 2013 episode. In 1900, a shipwreck was discovered near the island of Antikythera, including an assortment of luxury goods: statues, silver coins, vases ... and what turned out to be an amazing 2,000-year-old mechanism.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. This week we are putting out our
unearthed episodes for the first quarter, and to wet everyone's appetites,
we thought that we would replay an episode that is
related to one of the things we're going to talk about.
That's the Anti kids are a mechanism which we first
covered on the show on July. So enjoy. Welcome to
(00:27):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name
is Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And depending
on your definition of a computer, the subject of today's
podcast could qualify as the oldest that we know of.
(00:50):
And this story has all the makings of a good thriller.
There's a shipwrack, there's a mysterious device that's kind of
out of place in time, and there's actually an ongoing
debate over the origin of it, who built it in
the first place, and it's been studied extensively, but even
so it still holds this sort of level of mystery
about it. Maybe Aliens is one of those things that
(01:12):
people like to say, yeah, but not very many serious
scholars go a long. Serious scholars do not generally blame
things on aliens. They have a couple of theories that are,
you know, hold some water, but it's still up for debate.
I mostly said that maybe aliens thing because it is
cool and weird enough. Yeah, it's odd. It's definitely an
oddity in the context of the time in which it
(01:34):
was made, at least as far as we know. So
what this thing is, how this whole story really starts.
It actually starts two thousand years ago, but where modern
historians picked it up was in nineteen hundred uh And
at that time, a shipwreck was discovered near the island
of Antikithera by a sponge diver and his crew. So
(01:56):
this is like off the coast of Greece, and the
ship that they discovered had been carrying an assortment of
luxury goods when it sank, so bronze and marble statues,
silver coins, glass warrier, jewelry, Rhodian vases, and several other things,
but all pretty much luxury goods. In with all those
other treasures, the divers brought up arrusted bronze mass. In
(02:20):
nineteen or two, while studying the artifacts, archaeologists Valerios States
identified what he thought was a corroded gear wheel. Further
examination revealed that there were dozens of individual broken pieces
in the mass and that they were part of some
sort of clockwork style mechanism. Along with all those other
pieces that were retrieved through the years, eighty one different
(02:44):
fragments have been identified as part of this mystery object,
and at the time of the findings analysis there in
the early nineteen hundreds, it was dated to approximately one
fifty b C e That date has shifted a little
bit with additional analysis to being sometimes it's listed as
closer to one hundred BC, sometimes fifty b C e uh.
(03:07):
And in the nineteen seventies, famous diver and deep sea
explorer Jacques Cousteau found coins at that same site that
date the shipwrecked to around eighty five b C, although
it's believed that the device probably existed for as long
as two decades before the sinking, so depending on whose
(03:27):
analysis you look at, it somewhere between one fifty b
C and fifty b C, which is really a pretty
small timeframe when you consider how far back we're looking.
That's a pretty pinpointed narrow range. So for a long time,
no one really knew what this was for I mean,
it was just a pile of rusty, broken parts. Uh.
(03:48):
Some of them were rested together many so, you know,
not not really easy to determine what what it was
meant to do. It's believed to have possibly originated on
the Island of Roads, which has a historical reputation for
making automata and other mechanical artistry, as well as an
advanced knowledge of astronomy. In the context of the time
ship was believed to have been traveling, the dozens of
(04:11):
broken elements piece together would form dozens of dials that
interlocked and moved together in a fairly complex layered mechanism
in modern hands. The artifacts have had an interesting history
and they've continually challenged the people who have studied them.
So as early as the nineteen fifties, researchers and enthusiasts
(04:33):
were actually attempting to replicate the antikithera. Uh. You know,
they could tell that there were gears and cogs, and
they were trying to figure out what exactly it was for.
And some of them took the approach of well, let's
try to build a replica of it and they will
reveal what it's for. But there was always this gap
in the information of how the mechanism worked because so
many pieces were corroded together, uh, that there was never
(04:57):
really any big success along those lines. In nine two
scientists used X rays and gamma rays to further analyze
the fused but fragmented mechanism. Their names were doctor to
sell A. Price and doctor Kia Carlos. Their work brought
to light some of the complexity that the mechanism had. UH.
(05:19):
It really shed some light onto just how many pieces
and gears that were within this lump that they had
solidified and rested into. But even so it was hard
for them to make out individual pieces with any kind
of specificity. So doctor de Salo Price developed a model
of how he believed the mechanism worked, but it couldn't
account for all the pieces because the depth of the
(05:42):
arrangement of gears just wasn't clear from all of their
imaging work. There was also an Australian researcher named Alan
George Bromley who took more X rays and did a
little bit more analysis. But he really felt strongly that
new approaches to imaging we're gonna need to be developed
if they were ever going to truly gain an understanding
of this mechanisms workings. At this point, a former curator
(06:06):
at the Science Museum in London named Michael Wright developed
a specialized linear tomography machine that he was going to
use to capture more thorough images of the Antika through
mechanisms inner workings, and in linear tomography, X ray images
are collected while the X ray tube actually moves through
a range of positions, so you end up with a
(06:26):
series of exposure angles and it gives you a more
comprehensive data set for analysis of an object. And he
actually kind of built this on site where the anti
Kathro was kept because they had to kind of custom
build it to handle this one thing. You should also
remember his name. He has a long and heavy involvement
on research with the device. Yeah, he's a very famously
(06:49):
connected to the Antika thro So then they're they're continued
to be study throughout the late nine hundreds, and then
in two thousand five there were a batch of new
pieces found and this sort of catalyzed a consortium to
come together to try to finally form a conclusive analysis
of this device's workings in purpose. So along with Hewlett
(07:12):
Packard and x Tech, Systems. Cardiff University, the National and
Cappadestrian University of Athens, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and
the National Archaeological Museum of Athens all joined forces to
get to the bottom of this mystery. They were like,
we're never going to eat figure this out on our own.
Let's all put our our resources and our minds together
(07:34):
and see what the heck this thing actually is. So
in September of two thousand five, Hewlett Packard was able
to take a series of reflectance imaging photos of the
pieces of the mechanism. So this is a process that
(07:56):
captures repeated images of a surface under different lighting can missions.
Then that reveals details that we might otherwise miss. The
machine was custom built to do all this imaging, and
it reportedly cost about half a million dollars to build UH.
Hewlett Packard actually still has many of the images of
the Antikythera UH in an interactive online gallery and it
(08:18):
is super duper cool. So you can actually look at
how the different lighting um affects the details that you
can see, and you can play with sliders and look
at it and see like what it would look like
non corroded metallic finish. Uh. And we'll link to that
in the show notes because it's very fun to play with.
But morning you're going down a rabbit hole, you could
(08:39):
lose an hour or two very easily. X Tech brought
a twelve ton micro focused computerized tomographer to the party
and it was able to complete internal composition models of
the pieces in really great detail. So in November of
two thousand and six, Athens actually hosted a conference dedicated
to the Antikythera entitle Decoding the antiki thro Mechanism Science
(09:02):
and Technology in Ancient Greece. And at this conference, the
detailed findings of that analytical consortium were revealed to the world,
and their analysis had identified that all of those cogs
and pieces and pointers and knobs were part of what
they were calling a fairly complex analog computer. Uh. And
(09:23):
this was kind of groundbreaking information because these were mechanisms
that were at a level of complexity that the historical
record has no equal to until like a thousand years later.
So it was a really extraordinarily complex mechanism, particularly in
the context of the time it was dated to. But
(09:43):
then comes to the question of but what does that
analog computer compute? Exactly, so then we get to make
a replica. Yeah. So remember Michael right from before, key
factors in really hugely at this point. In two thousand eight,
Michael Wright, who was working in his workshop and hammers myth,
completed this major labor of love that he had been
(10:04):
working on for years, and that is the replica of
the anti Cathera mechanism and it works beautifully, it really does.
He used brass rather than bronze for most of the project. Yes,
so he had been working on this with those teams
from like the seventies on through so decades of his
life that he had kind of dedicated to this h
(10:24):
And when you see it, it's sort of breathtaking. There
is a knob at the side of the mechanism and
when it's turned by a user, it sets in motion
the movement of multiple dials on this impressive little machine.
And inside there are more than thirty gear wheels. But
it's a really fine example of an intuitive user interface
(10:45):
because to use it, you don't see any of the
complex mechanisms on the inside. You just have to turn
this knob and seamlessly and smoothly, all of these different
dials turn and show you different information. Just as on
the original machine, all the gears inside the replica have
triangular teeth. Some of them have as few as fifteen teeth,
(11:07):
and others have as many as two hundred and twenty three.
Each piece on the original artifact would have been handcut
from a sheet of bronze. So the front of the
mechanism includes pointers that feature the Greek zodiac, the location
of the moon, and the five planets that the Greeks
knew about, So that's Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn,
(11:28):
and an Egyptian calendar. And this front dial is actually
two separate dials, one that sits within another, and the
inner ring includes the zodiac and the outer ring is
a three hundred and sixty five day calendar. And when
the knob is turned, the device predicts the motions of
the heavens. So when you select a date on the
calendar by turning the knob, the heavenly bodies on their
(11:49):
respective pointers will rotate into their expected positions in the
sky for that date. Just pretty awesome. I literally kind
of get chills just talking about it because it's mind blowing.
It's really astounding. There's more information even than that on
the back on two dials that are stacked one above
the other. The top dial displays a nineteen year, two
(12:11):
thirty five month calendar and it marks, among other things,
the scheduling of the Olympic Games, which is kind of
a cool little um function for it to have, uh,
And it features individual months that are marked out along
the exterior ring of the dial. The bottom dial shows
a solunar calendar of seventy six years, including a predictive
(12:33):
model of lunar and solar eclipses. And what's really sort
of interesting about this little analog computer is its size.
It's like the size of a shoe box. It's really
quite small. So when you think about all the things
it can do by turning one single knob, That's why
I said, it's kind of a beautifully simple user interface
considering that all of those moving parts inside are predicting
(12:54):
all of those things at the same time. Again, mind blowing.
I feel like gets a tiny shoe box version of
that massive planetarium thing kind of inside like Audred's house
in the Dark pistol. Uh. And that brings up the
question of just who made this amazing mechanism, not Gelflings
(13:15):
and the short answer to the question is almost that,
though we don't know it could have been Guelflings. Sure
not really there, but there is a longer answer. Yeah.
The longer answer is because of the other relics on
board and the location of the shipwreck which held the device.
As we mentioned early on, historians have sort of considered
(13:37):
that it may have originated on roads, and there's additional
evidence to support that theory. The famed Greek astronomer Hipparchus
is believed to have worked on the island of Rhodes
from around b C until his death in one BC,
so for twenty years he was there uh and later Posidonius,
(13:58):
who was a philosopher and a follower of Hipparcis, actually
set up an astronomy school there at Rhodes. And the
writings of Cicero, the first century BC Roman lawyer and console,
a reference to the mechanism made by Poseidonius is made
(14:22):
quote which at each revolution produces the same motions of
the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets that take
place in the heavens every day and night. This has
of course led many to believe that the device is
the work of Posidonius or another Hipparcis follower, and supporting
this belief is the fact that, when uh imaging gave
(14:45):
us clearer views of the interior workings, the ratios of
two of the gear wheels within the device produce a
motion that very closely mimics the way Hipparcis described the
burying motion of the moon around the Earth, which had
not happened prior to him. I don't believe, but that's
not the only story that has um some weight behind
(15:06):
it in terms of potential origin. The month names inscribed
on the object were only used in certain parts of
northwestern Greece and Sicily. This calendar would have been used
in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, home to Archimedes. Since Archimedes,
who was a mathematician and astronomer, was known to have
built some astronomical models and mechanisms of his own, some
(15:29):
historians want to attribute the anti Catherat to him. However,
because Archimedes was killed at the Siege of Syracuse and
to twelve BC, that puts his death several decades before
the machine is believed to have been built. Some scholars
still feel that the machine could be part of a
tradition that perhaps descended from Archimedes and his work, but
(15:52):
the jury is still out the origin. There's no definitive
accepted origin story for it. But those are the two
pack leaders, and then of course the alien theorists, but
they don't really have any history to back that one up,
only a little. Uh. But then this all makes me ponder,
(16:14):
and I think many other people, so where does this bizarre,
wonderful thing fit into history? And why haven't we seen
more of these kinds of computing artifacts. And there is
a woman named Joe Marchant who has written a great
deal about um the the Antikythera, and she had even
wrote a book about it called The Coding the Heavens.
(16:35):
But in an article that she wrote for Nature, she
made the following quote that I really enjoyed, and it
was more surprising to an observer from the progress obsessed
twenty one century is the apparent lack of a subsequent
tradition based on the same technology of ever better clockwork
spreading out around the world. How can the capacity to
(16:56):
build the machine so magnificent have passed through history with
no is effects? So yeah, was this wondrous creation just
a one off of us an especially gifted engineer he
wanted to show off some extremely amazing skills or is
it really the only surviving piece of a part of history.
We've somehow not ever found other evidence of UH and
(17:20):
Michael Wright, who he referenced before, that is really quite
famous for making this beautiful replica. UH gave a quote
to the BBC in two thousand six where he said,
and he said it similarly in other interviews. The designer
and maker of the device knew what they wanted to achieve,
and they did it expertly. They made no mistakes to
do this. It can't have been very far from their
(17:42):
everyday stock work. And he I watched late in the
game after we had prepped all of our show notes
another interview with him, where he was saying, normally, if
you look at historical clockworks, you can almost see where
the plan was amended or the clockmaker kind of changed
his mind about how something was going to function. But
there are no such apparent changes in this. It really
(18:04):
is all put together beautifully with no It doesn't look
like there was ever any editing to the plan. So
most researchers agree with Right that this couldn't have been
a one of a kind object. One explanation for why
we haven't found anything else like this piece is that
it just survived almost entirely by blind Look. I mean
it is more than two thousand years old. Yes, so
(18:27):
long time for uh, you know, for for something to survive,
especially considering that bronze and other medals at the time
were really frequently melted down to make other objects. But
this sank to the bottom of the sea and it
remained relatively intact there. For context, the Athens Museum has
only ten major bronze statues from ancient Greece, nine of
(18:51):
which are from shipwrecks. Yeah, bronze really was so often
in high demand and short supply. So if it was
something that at wasn't needed any longer or had fallen
into disrepair, uh, which you know, these clockworks would presumably
have needed upkeep melt it down. Yeah, makes something new.
We need it for other things that I that might
(19:13):
be a tradition we should revive ourselves. Uh. While examples
of other mechanisms that model the movement of heavenly bodies
have been found that are closer to the time it's
believed that this existed, none of them are anywhere near
as detailed or sophisticated as the Antikythera. It's, as I
said earlier, not until the fourteenth century that even comparable
(19:34):
clockworks start to appear. The three largest fragments of this
mechanism are on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece,
and the smaller pieces of it are in storage at
the museum. Study of the Antikythera continues. I don't think
anybody believes the book is closed on this one. Uh.
(19:55):
There are still conferences and symposia that are held to
discuss its place in history, in its origin, and the
last one was quite recent. It was June of so
just a few weeks ago, really, uh, And it was
a workshop to bring the other classicists, astronomers, archaeologists, mathematicians
and historians and they all had the goal of discussing
(20:16):
science and innovation and antiquity around the theme of the
anti Kithro mechanism. So I'm hoping we get lots of
interesting papers to come out of that group, think uh.
And there's also continuing analysis of the inscriptions on the
mechanism in case there are any new revelations that people
haven't necessarily identified yet. And then in another fully functional
(20:37):
replica was built this time out of Lego. Naturally it
looks quite a bit different. Yeah, it's not a true replica, right,
but the function of each dial is faithfully duplicated using Lego.
And there's even a neat video that explains how the
mathematics of the gears work, how they combined to perform
(20:57):
the same functions as the brond artifact does, and we
will link to that in our show notes too. Yeah,
it's a it's one of those things that I really
it really is breathtaking. There in several of the links
that will appear in our show notes, there is a
video that was done by I believe, the New Scientists,
and it's Michael right kind of giving a demonstration of
(21:18):
it and turning the crank and you can see all
the wheels move and how beautifully it's smooth as silk.
I mean, there's no awkward chunking along. It's really really
it seems almost magical, which considering how many things that
are just much simpler you have to fiddle with, it's
pretty amazing. Yeah, it's it's really beautiful. Like the key
(21:41):
to my front door has to be jostled to work,
and exactly and this is a very complex machine, much
more difficult than the key to my front door, built
entirely replicating the specs of this two thousand year old object,
and it works perfectly and beautifully and is so smooth.
It's really quite as sound name the anti kids. Yeah,
(22:01):
I have like romantic attachment to it because it's so amazing.
I think that's valid. It's and I think I'm not
the only one. There are lots of people. Anytime you
see interviews with people that study it, they sort of
have that like giddy slash wistful combination where they're just
they're still blown away by it, even if they've been
working with it in the data sets for decades. It's
(22:21):
really quite cool. So that's the anti ki thro A mechanism.
Fay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
(22:46):
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to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(23:08):
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday, everybody. This week we are putting out our
unearthed episodes for the first quarter, and to wet everyone's appetites,
we thought that we would replay an episode that is
related to one of the things we're going to talk about.
That's the Anti kids are a mechanism which we first
covered on the show on July. So enjoy. Welcome to
(00:27):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name
is Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And depending
on your definition of a computer, the subject of today's
podcast could qualify as the oldest that we know of.
(00:50):
And this story has all the makings of a good thriller.
There's a shipwrack, there's a mysterious device that's kind of
out of place in time, and there's actually an ongoing
debate over the origin of it, who built it in
the first place, and it's been studied extensively, but even
so it still holds this sort of level of mystery
about it. Maybe Aliens is one of those things that
(01:12):
people like to say, yeah, but not very many serious
scholars go a long. Serious scholars do not generally blame
things on aliens. They have a couple of theories that are,
you know, hold some water, but it's still up for debate.
I mostly said that maybe aliens thing because it is
cool and weird enough. Yeah, it's odd. It's definitely an
oddity in the context of the time in which it
(01:34):
was made, at least as far as we know. So
what this thing is, how this whole story really starts.
It actually starts two thousand years ago, but where modern
historians picked it up was in nineteen hundred uh And
at that time, a shipwreck was discovered near the island
of Antikithera by a sponge diver and his crew. So
(01:56):
this is like off the coast of Greece, and the
ship that they discovered had been carrying an assortment of
luxury goods when it sank, so bronze and marble statues,
silver coins, glass warrier, jewelry, Rhodian vases, and several other things,
but all pretty much luxury goods. In with all those
other treasures, the divers brought up arrusted bronze mass. In
(02:20):
nineteen or two, while studying the artifacts, archaeologists Valerios States
identified what he thought was a corroded gear wheel. Further
examination revealed that there were dozens of individual broken pieces
in the mass and that they were part of some
sort of clockwork style mechanism. Along with all those other
pieces that were retrieved through the years, eighty one different
(02:44):
fragments have been identified as part of this mystery object,
and at the time of the findings analysis there in
the early nineteen hundreds, it was dated to approximately one
fifty b C e That date has shifted a little
bit with additional analysis to being sometimes it's listed as
closer to one hundred BC, sometimes fifty b C e uh.
(03:07):
And in the nineteen seventies, famous diver and deep sea
explorer Jacques Cousteau found coins at that same site that
date the shipwrecked to around eighty five b C, although
it's believed that the device probably existed for as long
as two decades before the sinking, so depending on whose
(03:27):
analysis you look at, it somewhere between one fifty b
C and fifty b C, which is really a pretty
small timeframe when you consider how far back we're looking.
That's a pretty pinpointed narrow range. So for a long time,
no one really knew what this was for I mean,
it was just a pile of rusty, broken parts. Uh.
(03:48):
Some of them were rested together many so, you know,
not not really easy to determine what what it was
meant to do. It's believed to have possibly originated on
the Island of Roads, which has a historical reputation for
making automata and other mechanical artistry, as well as an
advanced knowledge of astronomy. In the context of the time
ship was believed to have been traveling, the dozens of
(04:11):
broken elements piece together would form dozens of dials that
interlocked and moved together in a fairly complex layered mechanism
in modern hands. The artifacts have had an interesting history
and they've continually challenged the people who have studied them.
So as early as the nineteen fifties, researchers and enthusiasts
(04:33):
were actually attempting to replicate the antikithera. Uh. You know,
they could tell that there were gears and cogs, and
they were trying to figure out what exactly it was for.
And some of them took the approach of well, let's
try to build a replica of it and they will
reveal what it's for. But there was always this gap
in the information of how the mechanism worked because so
many pieces were corroded together, uh, that there was never
(04:57):
really any big success along those lines. In nine two
scientists used X rays and gamma rays to further analyze
the fused but fragmented mechanism. Their names were doctor to
sell A. Price and doctor Kia Carlos. Their work brought
to light some of the complexity that the mechanism had. UH.
(05:19):
It really shed some light onto just how many pieces
and gears that were within this lump that they had
solidified and rested into. But even so it was hard
for them to make out individual pieces with any kind
of specificity. So doctor de Salo Price developed a model
of how he believed the mechanism worked, but it couldn't
account for all the pieces because the depth of the
(05:42):
arrangement of gears just wasn't clear from all of their
imaging work. There was also an Australian researcher named Alan
George Bromley who took more X rays and did a
little bit more analysis. But he really felt strongly that
new approaches to imaging we're gonna need to be developed
if they were ever going to truly gain an understanding
of this mechanisms workings. At this point, a former curator
(06:06):
at the Science Museum in London named Michael Wright developed
a specialized linear tomography machine that he was going to
use to capture more thorough images of the Antika through
mechanisms inner workings, and in linear tomography, X ray images
are collected while the X ray tube actually moves through
a range of positions, so you end up with a
(06:26):
series of exposure angles and it gives you a more
comprehensive data set for analysis of an object. And he
actually kind of built this on site where the anti
Kathro was kept because they had to kind of custom
build it to handle this one thing. You should also
remember his name. He has a long and heavy involvement
on research with the device. Yeah, he's a very famously
(06:49):
connected to the Antika thro So then they're they're continued
to be study throughout the late nine hundreds, and then
in two thousand five there were a batch of new
pieces found and this sort of catalyzed a consortium to
come together to try to finally form a conclusive analysis
of this device's workings in purpose. So along with Hewlett
(07:12):
Packard and x Tech, Systems. Cardiff University, the National and
Cappadestrian University of Athens, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and
the National Archaeological Museum of Athens all joined forces to
get to the bottom of this mystery. They were like,
we're never going to eat figure this out on our own.
Let's all put our our resources and our minds together
(07:34):
and see what the heck this thing actually is. So
in September of two thousand five, Hewlett Packard was able
to take a series of reflectance imaging photos of the
pieces of the mechanism. So this is a process that
(07:56):
captures repeated images of a surface under different lighting can missions.
Then that reveals details that we might otherwise miss. The
machine was custom built to do all this imaging, and
it reportedly cost about half a million dollars to build UH.
Hewlett Packard actually still has many of the images of
the Antikythera UH in an interactive online gallery and it
(08:18):
is super duper cool. So you can actually look at
how the different lighting um affects the details that you
can see, and you can play with sliders and look
at it and see like what it would look like
non corroded metallic finish. Uh. And we'll link to that
in the show notes because it's very fun to play with.
But morning you're going down a rabbit hole, you could
(08:39):
lose an hour or two very easily. X Tech brought
a twelve ton micro focused computerized tomographer to the party
and it was able to complete internal composition models of
the pieces in really great detail. So in November of
two thousand and six, Athens actually hosted a conference dedicated
to the Antikythera entitle Decoding the antiki thro Mechanism Science
(09:02):
and Technology in Ancient Greece. And at this conference, the
detailed findings of that analytical consortium were revealed to the world,
and their analysis had identified that all of those cogs
and pieces and pointers and knobs were part of what
they were calling a fairly complex analog computer. Uh. And
(09:23):
this was kind of groundbreaking information because these were mechanisms
that were at a level of complexity that the historical
record has no equal to until like a thousand years later.
So it was a really extraordinarily complex mechanism, particularly in
the context of the time it was dated to. But
(09:43):
then comes to the question of but what does that
analog computer compute? Exactly, so then we get to make
a replica. Yeah. So remember Michael right from before, key
factors in really hugely at this point. In two thousand eight,
Michael Wright, who was working in his workshop and hammers myth,
completed this major labor of love that he had been
(10:04):
working on for years, and that is the replica of
the anti Cathera mechanism and it works beautifully, it really does.
He used brass rather than bronze for most of the project. Yes,
so he had been working on this with those teams
from like the seventies on through so decades of his
life that he had kind of dedicated to this h
(10:24):
And when you see it, it's sort of breathtaking. There
is a knob at the side of the mechanism and
when it's turned by a user, it sets in motion
the movement of multiple dials on this impressive little machine.
And inside there are more than thirty gear wheels. But
it's a really fine example of an intuitive user interface
(10:45):
because to use it, you don't see any of the
complex mechanisms on the inside. You just have to turn
this knob and seamlessly and smoothly, all of these different
dials turn and show you different information. Just as on
the original machine, all the gears inside the replica have
triangular teeth. Some of them have as few as fifteen teeth,
(11:07):
and others have as many as two hundred and twenty three.
Each piece on the original artifact would have been handcut
from a sheet of bronze. So the front of the
mechanism includes pointers that feature the Greek zodiac, the location
of the moon, and the five planets that the Greeks
knew about, So that's Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn,
(11:28):
and an Egyptian calendar. And this front dial is actually
two separate dials, one that sits within another, and the
inner ring includes the zodiac and the outer ring is
a three hundred and sixty five day calendar. And when
the knob is turned, the device predicts the motions of
the heavens. So when you select a date on the
calendar by turning the knob, the heavenly bodies on their
(11:49):
respective pointers will rotate into their expected positions in the
sky for that date. Just pretty awesome. I literally kind
of get chills just talking about it because it's mind blowing.
It's really astounding. There's more information even than that on
the back on two dials that are stacked one above
the other. The top dial displays a nineteen year, two
(12:11):
thirty five month calendar and it marks, among other things,
the scheduling of the Olympic Games, which is kind of
a cool little um function for it to have, uh,
And it features individual months that are marked out along
the exterior ring of the dial. The bottom dial shows
a solunar calendar of seventy six years, including a predictive
(12:33):
model of lunar and solar eclipses. And what's really sort
of interesting about this little analog computer is its size.
It's like the size of a shoe box. It's really
quite small. So when you think about all the things
it can do by turning one single knob, That's why
I said, it's kind of a beautifully simple user interface
considering that all of those moving parts inside are predicting
(12:54):
all of those things at the same time. Again, mind blowing.
I feel like gets a tiny shoe box version of
that massive planetarium thing kind of inside like Audred's house
in the Dark pistol. Uh. And that brings up the
question of just who made this amazing mechanism, not Gelflings
(13:15):
and the short answer to the question is almost that,
though we don't know it could have been Guelflings. Sure
not really there, but there is a longer answer. Yeah.
The longer answer is because of the other relics on
board and the location of the shipwreck which held the device.
As we mentioned early on, historians have sort of considered
(13:37):
that it may have originated on roads, and there's additional
evidence to support that theory. The famed Greek astronomer Hipparchus
is believed to have worked on the island of Rhodes
from around b C until his death in one BC,
so for twenty years he was there uh and later Posidonius,
(13:58):
who was a philosopher and a follower of Hipparcis, actually
set up an astronomy school there at Rhodes. And the
writings of Cicero, the first century BC Roman lawyer and console,
a reference to the mechanism made by Poseidonius is made
(14:22):
quote which at each revolution produces the same motions of
the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets that take
place in the heavens every day and night. This has
of course led many to believe that the device is
the work of Posidonius or another Hipparcis follower, and supporting
this belief is the fact that, when uh imaging gave
(14:45):
us clearer views of the interior workings, the ratios of
two of the gear wheels within the device produce a
motion that very closely mimics the way Hipparcis described the
burying motion of the moon around the Earth, which had
not happened prior to him. I don't believe, but that's
not the only story that has um some weight behind
(15:06):
it in terms of potential origin. The month names inscribed
on the object were only used in certain parts of
northwestern Greece and Sicily. This calendar would have been used
in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, home to Archimedes. Since Archimedes,
who was a mathematician and astronomer, was known to have
built some astronomical models and mechanisms of his own, some
(15:29):
historians want to attribute the anti Catherat to him. However,
because Archimedes was killed at the Siege of Syracuse and
to twelve BC, that puts his death several decades before
the machine is believed to have been built. Some scholars
still feel that the machine could be part of a
tradition that perhaps descended from Archimedes and his work, but
(15:52):
the jury is still out the origin. There's no definitive
accepted origin story for it. But those are the two
pack leaders, and then of course the alien theorists, but
they don't really have any history to back that one up,
only a little. Uh. But then this all makes me ponder,
(16:14):
and I think many other people, so where does this bizarre,
wonderful thing fit into history? And why haven't we seen
more of these kinds of computing artifacts. And there is
a woman named Joe Marchant who has written a great
deal about um the the Antikythera, and she had even
wrote a book about it called The Coding the Heavens.
(16:35):
But in an article that she wrote for Nature, she
made the following quote that I really enjoyed, and it
was more surprising to an observer from the progress obsessed
twenty one century is the apparent lack of a subsequent
tradition based on the same technology of ever better clockwork
spreading out around the world. How can the capacity to
(16:56):
build the machine so magnificent have passed through history with
no is effects? So yeah, was this wondrous creation just
a one off of us an especially gifted engineer he
wanted to show off some extremely amazing skills or is
it really the only surviving piece of a part of history.
We've somehow not ever found other evidence of UH and
(17:20):
Michael Wright, who he referenced before, that is really quite
famous for making this beautiful replica. UH gave a quote
to the BBC in two thousand six where he said,
and he said it similarly in other interviews. The designer
and maker of the device knew what they wanted to achieve,
and they did it expertly. They made no mistakes to
do this. It can't have been very far from their
(17:42):
everyday stock work. And he I watched late in the
game after we had prepped all of our show notes
another interview with him, where he was saying, normally, if
you look at historical clockworks, you can almost see where
the plan was amended or the clockmaker kind of changed
his mind about how something was going to function. But
there are no such apparent changes in this. It really
(18:04):
is all put together beautifully with no It doesn't look
like there was ever any editing to the plan. So
most researchers agree with Right that this couldn't have been
a one of a kind object. One explanation for why
we haven't found anything else like this piece is that
it just survived almost entirely by blind Look. I mean
it is more than two thousand years old. Yes, so
(18:27):
long time for uh, you know, for for something to survive,
especially considering that bronze and other medals at the time
were really frequently melted down to make other objects. But
this sank to the bottom of the sea and it
remained relatively intact there. For context, the Athens Museum has
only ten major bronze statues from ancient Greece, nine of
(18:51):
which are from shipwrecks. Yeah, bronze really was so often
in high demand and short supply. So if it was
something that at wasn't needed any longer or had fallen
into disrepair, uh, which you know, these clockworks would presumably
have needed upkeep melt it down. Yeah, makes something new.
We need it for other things that I that might
(19:13):
be a tradition we should revive ourselves. Uh. While examples
of other mechanisms that model the movement of heavenly bodies
have been found that are closer to the time it's
believed that this existed, none of them are anywhere near
as detailed or sophisticated as the Antikythera. It's, as I
said earlier, not until the fourteenth century that even comparable
(19:34):
clockworks start to appear. The three largest fragments of this
mechanism are on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece,
and the smaller pieces of it are in storage at
the museum. Study of the Antikythera continues. I don't think
anybody believes the book is closed on this one. Uh.
(19:55):
There are still conferences and symposia that are held to
discuss its place in history, in its origin, and the
last one was quite recent. It was June of so
just a few weeks ago, really, uh, And it was
a workshop to bring the other classicists, astronomers, archaeologists, mathematicians
and historians and they all had the goal of discussing
(20:16):
science and innovation and antiquity around the theme of the
anti Kithro mechanism. So I'm hoping we get lots of
interesting papers to come out of that group, think uh.
And there's also continuing analysis of the inscriptions on the
mechanism in case there are any new revelations that people
haven't necessarily identified yet. And then in another fully functional
(20:37):
replica was built this time out of Lego. Naturally it
looks quite a bit different. Yeah, it's not a true replica, right,
but the function of each dial is faithfully duplicated using Lego.
And there's even a neat video that explains how the
mathematics of the gears work, how they combined to perform
(20:57):
the same functions as the brond artifact does, and we
will link to that in our show notes too. Yeah,
it's a it's one of those things that I really
it really is breathtaking. There in several of the links
that will appear in our show notes, there is a
video that was done by I believe, the New Scientists,
and it's Michael right kind of giving a demonstration of
(21:18):
it and turning the crank and you can see all
the wheels move and how beautifully it's smooth as silk.
I mean, there's no awkward chunking along. It's really really
it seems almost magical, which considering how many things that
are just much simpler you have to fiddle with, it's
pretty amazing. Yeah, it's it's really beautiful. Like the key
(21:41):
to my front door has to be jostled to work,
and exactly and this is a very complex machine, much
more difficult than the key to my front door, built
entirely replicating the specs of this two thousand year old object,
and it works perfectly and beautifully and is so smooth.
It's really quite as sound name the anti kids. Yeah,
(22:01):
I have like romantic attachment to it because it's so amazing.
I think that's valid. It's and I think I'm not
the only one. There are lots of people. Anytime you
see interviews with people that study it, they sort of
have that like giddy slash wistful combination where they're just
they're still blown away by it, even if they've been
working with it in the data sets for decades. It's
(22:21):
really quite cool. So that's the anti ki thro A mechanism.
Fay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
(22:46):
I Heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
all over social media at missed in History, and you
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