July 29, 2013 • 25 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
of My name is Holly Frying 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
(00:23):
know of. And this story has all the makings of
a good thriller. There's a shipwreck, 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 and
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
(00:46):
of those things that 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. Right. I mostly said
maybe aliens thing because it is cool and weird enough.
It's odd. It's definitely an oddity in the context of
(01:08):
the time in which it 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
(01:30):
diver and his crew. So 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 warrior jewelry,
Rhodian vases, and several other things, but all pretty much
luxury goods in with all those other treasures the divers
(01:51):
brought up arrested bronze mass in nineteen o two. While
studying the artifacts, archaeologists Valerios Stays identify 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.
(02:13):
Along with all those other pieces that were retrieved through
the years, eighty one different 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
(02:35):
being Sometimes it's listed as closer to one hundred BC,
sometimes fifty b C e uh. And in the nineteen seventies,
famous diver and dep c 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
(02:56):
probably existed for as long as two decades before the sinking,
so depending on whose analysis you look at, it somewhere
between one fifty BC and fifty b C, which is
really a pretty small time frame 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
(03:17):
this was for. I mean, it was just a pile
of rusty, broken parts, 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 Rhodes, which has
a historical reputation for making automata and other mechanical artistry
(03:38):
as well as an advanced knowledge of astronomy. In the
context of the time ship was believed to have been traveling,
the dozens of 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
(03:59):
an interesting history and they've continually challenged the people who
have studied them. So as early as the nineteen fifties,
researchers and enthusiasts were actually attempting to replicate the anti Caithera. 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,
(04:19):
let's trying 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 really any big success along those lines. In ninety one,
two scientists used X rays and gamma rays to further
(04:40):
analyze the fused but fragmented mechanism. Their names were Doctor
to sell a Price and Doctor Kire Carlos. Their work
brought to light some of the complexity that the mechanism had. Uh.
It really shed some light onto just how many pieces
and gears that were within this lump that they had
(05:00):
solidified and rested into. But even so it was hard
for them to make out individual pieces with any kind
of specificity. So Dr de Solo 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
arrangement of gears just wasn't clear from all of their
imaging work. There was also an Australian researcher named Alan
(05:23):
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
at the Science Museum in London named Michael Wright developed
(05:44):
a specialized linear tomography machine that he was going to
use to capture more thorough images of the antiki through
mechanisms in her workings and in linear tomography X ray
images are collected while the X ray tube actually moved
through a range of positions, so you end up with
a series of exposure angles and it gives you a
more comprehensive data set for analysis of an object. And
(06:07):
he actually kind of built this on site where the
Antikathro was kept, because they had the 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
connected to the antika Thro. So then there there continued
(06:28):
to be study throughout the late nine hundreds, and then
in two thousand and 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 Packard and x Tech Systems, Cardiff University, the National
(06:52):
and Kappa Distrian 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 that 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 and see what the heck this thing
actually is. So in September of two thousand five, Hewlett
(07:15):
Packard was able to take a series of reflectance imaging
photos of the pieces of the mechanism. So this is
a process that captures repeated images of a surface under
different lighting conditions. 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
(07:35):
dollars to build. UH. Hewlett Packard actually still has many
of the images of the anti Cathra UH in an
interactive online gallery and it 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.
(07:58):
And we'll link to that in the show. Not because
it's very fun to play with, but morning you're going
down a rabbit hole, you could lose an hour or
two very easily. X Tech brought a twelve time 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 six, Athens
(08:22):
actually hosted a conference dedicated to the Antikithera entitled Decoding
the Anti Cithera Mechanism Science 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
(08:42):
and knobs were part of what they were calling a
fairly complex analog computer. Uh. And 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
(09:07):
the time. It was dated too. But 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, he factors in really hugely
at this point. In two thousand eight, Michael Wright, who
was working in his workshop in Hammersmith, completed this major
(09:28):
labor of love that he had been working on for years,
and that is the replica of the anti cathera mechanism
and it works beautifully. It really does. 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. Uh And when
(09:50):
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 because to
(10:12):
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, and others
(10:34):
have as many as two d 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, and an
(10:55):
Egyptian calendar. And this front dial is actually two separate dials,
one that fits 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 respective pointers will rotate into
(11:17):
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 thirty five month calendar
(11:39):
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 salunar calendar of
seventy six years, including a predictive model of loo ner
(12:00):
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 shoebox. 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 all of those things
(12:21):
at the same time. Again, mind blowing. I feel like
it's a tiny shoebox version of that massive planetarium thing.
It kind of inside like Audred's house into uh. And
that brings up the question of just who made this
amazing mechanism not Gelflings. And the short answer to the
(12:42):
question is almost that though we don't know, it could
have been Gelflings. 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 earlier on,
historians have sort of considered that it may have originated
(13:04):
on Rhods, 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 forty b C
until his death in one BC, so for twenty years
he was there. UH and later Posidonius, who was a
(13:25):
philosopher and a follower of Hipparcis, actually set up an
astronomy school there at Rhodes. In the writings of Cicero,
the first century b c. Roman lawyer and console, a
reference to the mechanism made by Poseidonius is made quote
which at each revolution produces the same motions of the Sun,
the Moon, and the five planets that take place in
(13:46):
the heavens every day and night. This has, of course
led many to believe that the device is the work
of Posidonius or another Hipparcus follower, and supporting this belief
is the fact that in uh imaging gave us clearer
views of the interior workings. The ratios of two of
(14:08):
the gear wheels within the device produced a motion that
very closely mimics the way Hipparchus described the varying 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 it in
terms of potential origin. The month names inscribed on the
object were only used in certain parts of northwestern Greece
(14:31):
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 historians
want to attribute the anti Catherat to him. However, because
Archimedes was killed at the Siege of Syracuse and to
(14:54):
twelve BC, that puts his death several decades before the
machine is believed to have been built. Some scholars still
feel that the machine can be part of a tradition
that perhaps descended from our Comedes and his work, But
the jury is still out the origin. There's no definitive
accepted origin story for it. But those are the two
(15:16):
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. But then this all makes me ponder,
and I think many other people so where does this bizarre,
(15:36):
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 the the anti Catherra, and she had even
wrote a book about it called The Coding the Heavens.
But in an article that she wrote for Nature, she
(15:57):
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
build the machine so magnificent have passed through history with
no obvious effects? So? Yeah, was this wondrous creation just
(16:21):
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 Michael Wright, who he referenced before, that is really
quite famous for making this beautiful replica. UH gave a
(16:44):
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
everyday awkwork. And he I watched late in the game,
after we had prepped all of our show notes another
(17:06):
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 is
all put together beautifully with no It doesn't look like
there was ever any editing to the plan. So most
(17:29):
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, a long time
for uh, you know, for for something to survive, especially
(17:50):
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 which
are from shipwrecks. Yeah, bronze truly was so often in
(18:14):
high demand and short supply. So if it was something
that 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 be a tradition
we should revive ourselves. Uh. While examples of other mechanisms
(18:36):
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 Antikithera. It's, as I said earlier, not until
the fourteenth century that even comparable clockworks start to appear.
The three largest fragments of this mechanism are on display
(18:58):
at the National Archiligical Museum in Athens, Greece, and the
smaller pieces of it are in storage at the museum
study of the anti Citha continues. I don't think anybody
believes the book is closed on this one. Uh. There
are still conferences and symposia that are held to discuss
its place in history and its origin. And the last
(19:19):
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 science
and innovation and antiquity around the theme of the antikithera mechanism.
So I'm hoping we get lots of interesting papers to
(19:39):
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 replica was built, this
time out of lego. Naturally, it looks quite a bit different. Yeah,
(20:02):
it's not a true replica, right, but the function of
each dial is faithfully duplicated using a Lego. And there's
even a neat video that explains how the mathematics of
the gears work, how they combine to perform the same
functions as the brond artifact does, and we will link
to that in our show notes too. Yeah, it's a
(20:22):
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 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
(20:46):
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 to my front
door 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
(21:09):
of this two thousand year old object, and it works
perfectly and beautifully and is so smooth. It's really quite
a sound name. The Anti Kids are A. Yeah, 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
(21:30):
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 and the data sets for decades. It's
really quite cool. So that's the anti kids through a mechanism.
Do you also have some listener mail? I do. Indeed,
this mail is from our listener charity, and it made
me smile so much that I knew I had to
(21:50):
read it at some point. And she says, uh, Hi,
Tracey and Holly, I'm a huge stuff you missed in
history class fan. I've been listening since almost the beginning,
and I can't tell you how much times the podcast
has saved my tale on history tests all throughout high
school and some in college. I just thought you should
know that I just finished listening to the Nicola Tesla
episodes and I thought it was so fascinating that podcast
(22:12):
actually helped me understand an entire episode of Bob's Burgers
on Fox. The entire episode is centered around the electrocution
of Topsy the elephant that Edison used as an example
to show that a C current was better than Tesla's
DC current. I thought y'all should know that your podcasts
are always full of helpful information for understanding our world today,
whether it be science or pop culture. I love Bob's Burgers.
(22:34):
It's one of my favorite shows on TV, and that
episode had me laughing so hard. There's a whole beautiful
musical number song between the elephant and edis called Electric Love,
and if you, um, if you haven't watched it, I
hope you give it a watch because it's really entertaining.
Uh And it's on Netflix, so yeah, you can check
(22:55):
it out well. And we we get a pretty frequent
number of email, some tweets and things from people who say,
I watched this movie or I read this book or whatever,
and I understood it thanks to your podcast, and that
makes me very happy. Yes. Yeah. The premise of that
particular episode is there is a substitute teacher who really
is a big Edison fan and one of the kids
(23:18):
of the main family on the show, Bob Belcher and
his wife Linda uh wants to take him down, and
so she wants to show how horrible some of the
behavior was, and at the same time, there's also this
romanticizing of the relationship between Edison and this elephant. It's
so funny. It's just like Tesla and Edison slash fiction. No, okay,
(23:42):
here's what I'm saying. Mega Molalley and Kevin Klein sing
the song. So that's really all you need to know.
I mean, if that doesn't sell you the ticket, I
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(24:02):
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for ancient technology and you'll get a few different articles,
including how did ancient civilizations use sundials to tell time?
(24:24):
And another really fun one called ten Amazing Egyptian Inventions.
There's lots of cool stuff going on way before people
often credit it as existing. Yeah, everyone who lived for
us what they it was not. They were solving problems
and thinking of things too yet. Uh so you should
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(24:46):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
of My name is Holly Frying 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
(00:23):
know of. And this story has all the makings of
a good thriller. There's a shipwreck, 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 and
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
(00:46):
of those things that 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. Right. I mostly said
maybe aliens thing because it is cool and weird enough.
It's odd. It's definitely an oddity in the context of
(01:08):
the time in which it 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
(01:30):
diver and his crew. So 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 warrior jewelry,
Rhodian vases, and several other things, but all pretty much
luxury goods in with all those other treasures the divers
(01:51):
brought up arrested bronze mass in nineteen o two. While
studying the artifacts, archaeologists Valerios Stays identify 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.
(02:13):
Along with all those other pieces that were retrieved through
the years, eighty one different 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
(02:35):
being Sometimes it's listed as closer to one hundred BC,
sometimes fifty b C e uh. And in the nineteen seventies,
famous diver and dep c 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
(02:56):
probably existed for as long as two decades before the sinking,
so depending on whose analysis you look at, it somewhere
between one fifty BC and fifty b C, which is
really a pretty small time frame 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
(03:17):
this was for. I mean, it was just a pile
of rusty, broken parts, 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 Rhodes, which has
a historical reputation for making automata and other mechanical artistry
(03:38):
as well as an advanced knowledge of astronomy. In the
context of the time ship was believed to have been traveling,
the dozens of 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
(03:59):
an interesting history and they've continually challenged the people who
have studied them. So as early as the nineteen fifties,
researchers and enthusiasts were actually attempting to replicate the anti Caithera. 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,
(04:19):
let's trying 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 really any big success along those lines. In ninety one,
two scientists used X rays and gamma rays to further
(04:40):
analyze the fused but fragmented mechanism. Their names were Doctor
to sell a Price and Doctor Kire Carlos. Their work
brought to light some of the complexity that the mechanism had. Uh.
It really shed some light onto just how many pieces
and gears that were within this lump that they had
(05:00):
solidified and rested into. But even so it was hard
for them to make out individual pieces with any kind
of specificity. So Dr de Solo 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
arrangement of gears just wasn't clear from all of their
imaging work. There was also an Australian researcher named Alan
(05:23):
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
at the Science Museum in London named Michael Wright developed
(05:44):
a specialized linear tomography machine that he was going to
use to capture more thorough images of the antiki through
mechanisms in her workings and in linear tomography X ray
images are collected while the X ray tube actually moved
through a range of positions, so you end up with
a series of exposure angles and it gives you a
more comprehensive data set for analysis of an object. And
(06:07):
he actually kind of built this on site where the
Antikathro was kept, because they had the 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
connected to the antika Thro. So then there there continued
(06:28):
to be study throughout the late nine hundreds, and then
in two thousand and 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 Packard and x Tech Systems, Cardiff University, the National
(06:52):
and Kappa Distrian 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 that 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 and see what the heck this thing
actually is. So in September of two thousand five, Hewlett
(07:15):
Packard was able to take a series of reflectance imaging
photos of the pieces of the mechanism. So this is
a process that captures repeated images of a surface under
different lighting conditions. 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
(07:35):
dollars to build. UH. Hewlett Packard actually still has many
of the images of the anti Cathra UH in an
interactive online gallery and it 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.
(07:58):
And we'll link to that in the show. Not because
it's very fun to play with, but morning you're going
down a rabbit hole, you could lose an hour or
two very easily. X Tech brought a twelve time 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 six, Athens
(08:22):
actually hosted a conference dedicated to the Antikithera entitled Decoding
the Anti Cithera Mechanism Science 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
(08:42):
and knobs were part of what they were calling a
fairly complex analog computer. Uh. And 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
(09:07):
the time. It was dated too. But 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, he factors in really hugely
at this point. In two thousand eight, Michael Wright, who
was working in his workshop in Hammersmith, completed this major
(09:28):
labor of love that he had been working on for years,
and that is the replica of the anti cathera mechanism
and it works beautifully. It really does. 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. Uh And when
(09:50):
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 because to
(10:12):
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, and others
(10:34):
have as many as two d 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, and an
(10:55):
Egyptian calendar. And this front dial is actually two separate dials,
one that fits 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 respective pointers will rotate into
(11:17):
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 thirty five month calendar
(11:39):
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 salunar calendar of
seventy six years, including a predictive model of loo ner
(12:00):
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 shoebox. 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 all of those things
(12:21):
at the same time. Again, mind blowing. I feel like
it's a tiny shoebox version of that massive planetarium thing.
It kind of inside like Audred's house into uh. And
that brings up the question of just who made this
amazing mechanism not Gelflings. And the short answer to the
(12:42):
question is almost that though we don't know, it could
have been Gelflings. 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 earlier on,
historians have sort of considered that it may have originated
(13:04):
on Rhods, 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 forty b C
until his death in one BC, so for twenty years
he was there. UH and later Posidonius, who was a
(13:25):
philosopher and a follower of Hipparcis, actually set up an
astronomy school there at Rhodes. In the writings of Cicero,
the first century b c. Roman lawyer and console, a
reference to the mechanism made by Poseidonius is made quote
which at each revolution produces the same motions of the Sun,
the Moon, and the five planets that take place in
(13:46):
the heavens every day and night. This has, of course
led many to believe that the device is the work
of Posidonius or another Hipparcus follower, and supporting this belief
is the fact that in uh imaging gave us clearer
views of the interior workings. The ratios of two of
(14:08):
the gear wheels within the device produced a motion that
very closely mimics the way Hipparchus described the varying 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 it in
terms of potential origin. The month names inscribed on the
object were only used in certain parts of northwestern Greece
(14:31):
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 historians
want to attribute the anti Catherat to him. However, because
Archimedes was killed at the Siege of Syracuse and to
(14:54):
twelve BC, that puts his death several decades before the
machine is believed to have been built. Some scholars still
feel that the machine can be part of a tradition
that perhaps descended from our Comedes and his work, But
the jury is still out the origin. There's no definitive
accepted origin story for it. But those are the two
(15:16):
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. But then this all makes me ponder,
and I think many other people so where does this bizarre,
(15:36):
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 the the anti Catherra, and she had even
wrote a book about it called The Coding the Heavens.
But in an article that she wrote for Nature, she
(15:57):
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
build the machine so magnificent have passed through history with
no obvious effects? So? Yeah, was this wondrous creation just
(16:21):
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 Michael Wright, who he referenced before, that is really
quite famous for making this beautiful replica. UH gave a
(16:44):
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
everyday awkwork. And he I watched late in the game,
after we had prepped all of our show notes another
(17:06):
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 is
all put together beautifully with no It doesn't look like
there was ever any editing to the plan. So most
(17:29):
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, a long time
for uh, you know, for for something to survive, especially
(17:50):
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 which
are from shipwrecks. Yeah, bronze truly was so often in
(18:14):
high demand and short supply. So if it was something
that 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 be a tradition
we should revive ourselves. Uh. While examples of other mechanisms
(18:36):
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 Antikithera. It's, as I said earlier, not until
the fourteenth century that even comparable clockworks start to appear.
The three largest fragments of this mechanism are on display
(18:58):
at the National Archiligical Museum in Athens, Greece, and the
smaller pieces of it are in storage at the museum
study of the anti Citha continues. I don't think anybody
believes the book is closed on this one. Uh. There
are still conferences and symposia that are held to discuss
its place in history and its origin. And the last
(19:19):
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 science
and innovation and antiquity around the theme of the antikithera mechanism.
So I'm hoping we get lots of interesting papers to
(19:39):
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 replica was built, this
time out of lego. Naturally, it looks quite a bit different. Yeah,
(20:02):
it's not a true replica, right, but the function of
each dial is faithfully duplicated using a Lego. And there's
even a neat video that explains how the mathematics of
the gears work, how they combine to perform the same
functions as the brond artifact does, and we will link
to that in our show notes too. Yeah, it's a
(20:22):
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 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
(20:46):
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 to my front
door 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
(21:09):
of this two thousand year old object, and it works
perfectly and beautifully and is so smooth. It's really quite
a sound name. The Anti Kids are A. Yeah, 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
(21:30):
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 and the data sets for decades. It's
really quite cool. So that's the anti kids through a mechanism.
Do you also have some listener mail? I do. Indeed,
this mail is from our listener charity, and it made
me smile so much that I knew I had to
(21:50):
read it at some point. And she says, uh, Hi,
Tracey and Holly, I'm a huge stuff you missed in
history class fan. I've been listening since almost the beginning,
and I can't tell you how much times the podcast
has saved my tale on history tests all throughout high
school and some in college. I just thought you should
know that I just finished listening to the Nicola Tesla
episodes and I thought it was so fascinating that podcast
(22:12):
actually helped me understand an entire episode of Bob's Burgers
on Fox. The entire episode is centered around the electrocution
of Topsy the elephant that Edison used as an example
to show that a C current was better than Tesla's
DC current. I thought y'all should know that your podcasts
are always full of helpful information for understanding our world today,
whether it be science or pop culture. I love Bob's Burgers.
(22:34):
It's one of my favorite shows on TV, and that
episode had me laughing so hard. There's a whole beautiful
musical number song between the elephant and edis called Electric Love,
and if you, um, if you haven't watched it, I
hope you give it a watch because it's really entertaining.
Uh And it's on Netflix, so yeah, you can check
(22:55):
it out well. And we we get a pretty frequent
number of email, some tweets and things from people who say,
I watched this movie or I read this book or whatever,
and I understood it thanks to your podcast, and that
makes me very happy. Yes. Yeah. The premise of that
particular episode is there is a substitute teacher who really
is a big Edison fan and one of the kids
(23:18):
of the main family on the show, Bob Belcher and
his wife Linda uh wants to take him down, and
so she wants to show how horrible some of the
behavior was, and at the same time, there's also this
romanticizing of the relationship between Edison and this elephant. It's
so funny. It's just like Tesla and Edison slash fiction. No, okay,
(23:42):
here's what I'm saying. Mega Molalley and Kevin Klein sing
the song. So that's really all you need to know.
I mean, if that doesn't sell you the ticket, I
don't know what does. Uh. If you would like to
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(24:02):
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(24:24):
And another really fun one called ten Amazing Egyptian Inventions.
There's lots of cool stuff going on way before people
often credit it as existing. Yeah, everyone who lived for
us what they it was not. They were solving problems
and thinking of things too yet. Uh so you should
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(24:46):
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