Rerun: Antikythera Update

You wouldn't think a 2,000 year old machine would need an update, but it does! This classic episode features Joe McCormick and Jonathan talking about an ancient Greek computer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech and folks. My plan
was to present part two of the Founding of General

(00:24):
Motors for today. I was going to do a full
episode about that, and I'm still working on it, but
my neighborhood has been hit with some outages in internet service, uh,
quite a few of them. Unfortunately. That has really impaired
my ability to continue my research and dive in and
be able to frame out that episode. But I don't

(00:48):
want to leave you guys without an episode to listen to.
And at the same time, I can't really record something
new unless I'm just speaking off the cuff, and let's
be honest, none of us want that. So instead and
I thought I would bring to you a classic episode.
This is actually called the Antikithera Update episode, but there's

(01:08):
an update to the update that I will talk about
once this episode plays through. This was a very special
episode where Joe McCormick, who is now one of the
co hosts of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, joined me
for the show. And we talked about this remarkable device
from the Greeks of old that was discovered in the

(01:30):
early twentieth century and what we had learned from it
up to that point. But as you will hear when
we get to the end, we've learned a little bit more.
So let's listen to this classic episode and I'll chat
with you some more at the end of the episode.
On forward thinking, we usually talk about the future or
another and um, so I wanted to go in completely

(01:53):
the opposite direction and talk about the technology of the past.
And I started thinking, I wonder, what's the oldest computer
that we know about? Oh, I got you. So we're
talking nineteen forty six with ani AC, right, that computer
that you would end up programming with lots of plugs
and switches, not at all? Wow? No, so wait are you?

(02:14):
You're saying it's older than that? Older? Okay, al right,
well find how about the ninety two that's the TENNAS
soft Berry computer or ABC, which was built at Iowa
State College which is now university. Obviously, but there was
there was a patent dispute actually that was decided in
the United States government about whether any AC or the
ABC computer were first and ultimately they said that it uh,

(02:38):
you could not have anyone to claim they were the
ones to invent the computer. That's the first one, right,
ABC computer. Okay, alright, N one. We're starting to get
a little fuzzy here, but all right, So Conrad Zeus
builds the Z three computer. And that was also the
same year when the first bomba was built, you know,
one of the devices meant to help decrypt German messages.

(03:01):
That's it, right, all right? Ninety nine George Stimmitts completes
the complex number calculator, the c n C at Bell
Telephone Laboratories. We just finished talking about Bell Labs. This
has got to be it. And even in the first
demonstration he used teletype so that he could program this
remotely over special telephone line, so it was the first

(03:23):
remote computer as well. So that's it, right, I think
you need to think less electricity fine, fine eighty seven
the Analytical Engine. Charles Babbage, he designs this, never finishes
it in his lifetime, but of course that is the
device that Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers, had possibly
even created computer programs for algorithms where she envisioned a

(03:46):
time where you could encode things like music and poetry
into mathematics. That's it, the analytical engine. Okay, so we're
gonna talk about that. You're you're about two years off
to say what not about? Almost? Okay, so what are
you talking about? I'm talking about something that is called

(04:08):
the antique antique antique. Oh, we're gonna have this problem
the whole time, the anti cithera mess Yes, the anti
cithera mechanism or also known as the antikathera mechanism. Yeah,
it all depends on the r which pronunciation you follow.
Anti Cithera seems to be fairly commonplace. So we're gonna
go ahead and use that one and probably switch off

(04:30):
without even thinking about it. All right, I know a
little bit about this, but I guess before we talk
about this mechanism, maybe we need to say what the
heck is anti Cithera. For anyone who is not familiar
with the the geography of Greece, you may not know
this is. This refers to a place. Yeah, it's an
island in the Mediterranean Sea. And if you um, if

(04:51):
you imagine you're looking at the Mediterranean, it's the small
island that's between Crete to the south and the Peloponnesian
Peninsula up to the north, so the mainland of Greece,
and it's right there in the middle. Um, there's a
bigger island just called Kythera, and this is a smaller
one offset from it called Antikythera. So if Antikithera and
Kithera were to collide, it would just destroy one another. Yeah,

(05:14):
total positronic reversilation. Yeah, you know, tell them about the twinkie. So,
you know, joking aside, Does that mean that this is
where that mechanism was made? Um? No, probably not. This
is where the mechanism was discovered. How it got its name? Gotcha?
So someone was walking around Antikithera one day and they

(05:35):
stubbed their toe and oh, what's this and found the
world's oldest computer. No, it's much creepier. Um, okay, So
the story goes like this. Around the year nineteen hundred,
there was a group of sponge divers who were off
the coast of Anti Cithera and they were doing their
diving and guess whatever sponge divers do, they were gathering sponges,

(05:56):
gathering sponges to wash all their dishes exactly. Um, So
they were doing their thing but apparently one of the
divers came up to the surface and he was like, guys,
there are dead women lying all over the bottom of
the ocean. There's a bunch of naked dead ladies at
the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, sounds creepy, but SATs. Yeah.

(06:16):
Actually what he was seeing were statues. There were bronze
and marble statues that were part of the payload of
a almost well I guess about exactly to two year
old ship wreck of a ship that was a Roman ship,
a large Roman ship carrying a lot of cargo, much
of it probably stolen or looted cargo. Right, we're talking

(06:38):
at an era just around the time when the Romans
were beginning to uh, let's say, incorporate the Hellenistic societies
into their empire. Of course, So it had all these
Greek artifacts on it, yeah, and the luxury items, like
really expensive stuff in the Greek world. Yeah. And so
the idea is, we don't know exactly what the ship

(06:59):
was doing. We think it was probably a ship that
was returning to Rome from some destination uh in the
Greek world. And so there are a lot of these
Greek artifacts, including currency. Uh. They had like you said, statues,
they had lots of pottery, um, and they had this
this device, which was well, at first, it was just

(07:20):
a lump, right, yeah, right, yeah, first, Well, and of
course it didn't get that much attention early on because
there was so much other stuff down there in that shipwreck. Right,
So the people who went into really investigate the shipwreck
and take a look and see what was going on,
they didn't necessarily realize that there was something truly special,

(07:41):
something that was beyond just uh special from an artistic
merit point of view, but could tell us a lot
about how much the ancient Greeks knew about craftsmanship, about astronomy,
about math, all of these things we've become apparent, but
only a hundred years later, right after the explorer. So

(08:03):
so it' it's it's forgotten for two thousand years essentially,
and then for another hundred years we don't really know
what it is. So it's kind of this lump of
corroded bronze inside what what used to be a wooden
box essentially disintegrated. Yeah, so there's like there's one big
remaining lump, but they're about eighty two fragments in total. Right,

(08:23):
So one of those fragments. The main fragment has the
vast majority of the what we know of as the
inner workings of whatever this device was supposed to be.
And we know a lot more about now, but don't
want to ruin the surprise. No, But so basically we
can say like what it was made of. So what
they think now is, Okay, this looks like it was
some kind of collection of bronze gears inside of a

(08:47):
wooden casing. Yeah. In fact, at first they thought it
might only be just one gear that somehow was loose
from something else, and then they realized, no, there's actually
several gears here, but it's all corroded together. Yeah, it's
it's sort of like a fused into a big body
of the ocean, snotball. Yeah exactly. That's very accurate. Um.
But so if you can imagine, I would call like

(09:08):
imagine a mid sized dictionary, not like a pocket dictionary,
but also not that huge one from the library that
you couldn't see it like a like a large hardback dictionary. Um.
And it's got a wooden casing, so you could open
that casing up and then inside you've got this corroded
mass that uh, that is all this gear formation. Now,

(09:32):
of course the wooden casing doesn't really remain except in
rotted fragmentary form um. But that's the basic mechanism we're
dealing with. And if you start to look at it,
you would see this one big gear um, but you
might wonder what does this thing do? Yeah, and beyond that,
I mean, before we even get to that, like how

(09:52):
old is this thing? Oh? Yeah, because I mean we
we figured that the shipwreck happens sometime around eight five
BC before common eras because mostly because of the dates
that we found. And I say we, but the explorers
found on the currency. Yeah, you know, sometimes Joe and
I we get we get tired of working on stuff
before thinking, we pop out to the Greek islands and

(10:14):
then just go well skin diving, yeah, you know. And X,
by the way, does mark the spot now, But we
by dating things like the currency, they have sort of
narrowed the ranged around five b C. But that that
doesn't necessarily mean that's how old the device is. No,
they think that the device is older than the wreck.
It wasn't built like right before that. It's generally dated

(10:37):
between a hundred and a hundred and fifty b C.
So it's thought of as a second century BC device, right,
So so it is an ancient device. Uh, that seems
to be about how old it is. Uh, we've got
some ideas of where it may have come from. There
were some No, we don't we don't have any The
instruction manual for this device was not anywhere to be ound.

(11:00):
It was not on the glove compartment of this shipwreck.
So we can't be absolutely certain. Uh. There's some speculation
that maybe it was the island of Rhodes, which was
known for its scholarship and also it's craftsmanship. But there
are some other options as well that we can talk about.
But beyond that, Um, you know, we've talked about what
was made of, we talked about how old it was,

(11:20):
but yeah, what what did this thing do? And at
first it was a real mystery. In fact, for like
we said, like a century, it was a mystery. We
just didn't have enough information to be able to determine that.
We had some wild guests. There were people who made
some good guess but they didn't know the full extent yet. Um,
and that they didn't realize initially how awesome this thing was.

(11:43):
You know, we can make an argument that this is
the oldest computer, which obviously means that it has to
do more than just have some inner work, inner working
gears that move smoothly. It has to do something beyond that,
because otherwise anything that was reliant on gears and clockwork
you could call a computer her. But we'll get into
exactly what it is that this thing did. That kind

(12:03):
of makes us consider it more of a computer device
and analog computer than some sort of interesting clockwork. Right. So, um,
but in general, what we understand it to have been
able to do, and in fact, we understand a lot
more about it in very recent years than we had
for the century leading up to it. Oh well, I'd say,

(12:24):
now we've basically had a slam dunk in this one.
Recent recent revelations have shown us, Oh, this is pretty
much exactly what it is. Yeah, which is phenomenal when
you think of how badly and repair this thing was.
But but ultimately what it does is it's it's a
device that not only tracks celestial events and the movement

(12:45):
of celestial bodies in relation to our perspective here on Earth,
it also predicts them. So in other words, you not
only can you uh, can you keep track of what's
going on, and it could give you an indication of
where you would need to look in the sky if
you wanted to see something like Mars. It also would
tell you that, oh, on this particular date, you will

(13:06):
have a full solar eclipse. It's kind of cool. Yeah.
In other words, an astronomical calculatory UM. And so what
it would do is it would have a position of
the Earth and then um by moving the hand crank,
which which no longer exists, but that's that's we figure.
It was a hand crank that that provided the the

(13:29):
kinetic energy to make everything turn. But by moving that
you could see at the same time, based on a
projected date in the future, the positions of the Sun,
of the Moon, um. Probably of the planets we don't
know the planet gears are missing right now, probably at
least the plants that the Greeks knew about, which included

(13:50):
the probably not the planets that probably not the we
don't think well, not Neptune, Uranus or or if you
want to be kind, Pluto. They they had identified as
far out as Saturn. Now, if in fact we were
to find evidence that it included these other planets as well,
that as far as we know, they didn't know about.
Then that would make the third part of our conversation

(14:13):
to get a little more interesting. It also had yeah,
as you said, an eclipse prediction dial uh and that's
really cool. Uh. And it also predicted cultural events, so yeah,
that's true, like the Olympiad, right, because you had a
schedule of when that would take place, and so by
plotting it against this device and actually inscribing it on

(14:33):
the device, you could in a factor then you could
see what the what the celestial events were going to
be at a planned future event that way, which is
kind of handy. Um. But we'll talk specifically. We need
to really get into the nitty gritty of how this
is possible, and then we'll conclude at the end talking
about how we know all of this stuff, because, as

(14:53):
you're gonna learn, it's really complicated figure out how a
device works if you can't actually visualize all the gears
when you first get hold of it. Joe and I
will have more to say about the Antikithera mechanism in
just a moment, but first let's take a quick break.
All right, we're back, so let's talk about how this

(15:16):
device actually tracked celestial events. Okay, so we we know
they're all these gears. There's a hand cranky turn. It
moves things forwards that you can look at what the
celestial conditions are on any given date, or you can
even advance it so that you can look for a
specific celestial event. Let's say you're looking specifically for when

(15:36):
is the next eclipse going to occur? So you're not
looking to see what the celestial scott what the sky
is going to look like, um, three months from now,
you just want to know when the next eclipse is.
You could advance the handle from your date and keep
doing it until you saw the eclipse information come up,
and then compare that see what the date is on
the other part of the indicator. We'll talk about all

(15:58):
the different dials to be indicated by a dial, so
it's like it's like an analog clock face. You would
be spinning around a point to let you know when
this is coming exactly, and then you could say, oh,
all right, so the next eclipse is in you know,
you know, three months and two weeks from now or whatever,
and uh So there's a lot of different ways you
could use this. Well, um, there were about thirty thirty

(16:21):
one gears that we know of, probably at least at
least more or at least thirty probably more, though it's
I think hypothesized that there were more to deal with
the movement of the planets that that's just lost. And
you know, it's not a surprise because again, like I said,
when we call it bad repair, I mean you're you
think about this. This is like essentially the imagine a
clock that's been fused into one piece. I mean an

(16:43):
old style gear clock fused into one piece. That's kind
of and it's it's opaque, so you can't see these
gears that are on the inside just with the naked eye.
But we'll get into how we figured more about this
in a little bit. But so you had all these
different dials that would mark different of sense uh and
different time spans. Right, So you would have a dial

(17:05):
that would be set up for for just regular keeping
of of a calendar year, but there were also dials
that were more attuned to specific celestial cycles. So for example,
there might be a nineteen year cycle that's represented by
one dial. Another one had I think a seventy five
year dial, And these dials were to refer to things

(17:27):
that patterns that would repeat once you hit those time frames,
so like every nineteen years, this one set of pattern
would repeat itself. So that's why they have these different
dials to indicate exactly what's happening at exactly what time. Uh.
What I loved was the idea that there was one
gear specifically devoted to showing the phase of the moon,

(17:50):
So not only would you see the position of the
moon on any given date, but you would also see
what phase it was in, whether it was waxing or waning,
a new moon, full moon, what ever. And and uh,
I really thought that was very clever. So yeah, you
essentially either either refer to the dates and look at
the celestial events to compare the two, or you would

(18:12):
said it so that you would look at a specific
configuration of the celestial body and then look at what
date corresponded to it. It's um kind of amazing to
imagine the complex planning and craftsmanship that went into a
machine like this, because, um, when you start thinking about it, Okay,

(18:34):
say somebody set you down and told you to try
to build something like this, and you had you know
it was open book test, you knew what time frame
all these celestial events would occur in how would you
do it? Yeah, I mean God, so you would hit
some kind of figure out the relationships between the sizes
of gears um and the way they would interlock to

(18:56):
create fractional relationships between the movements of all the different
bodies at the same time. And keep in mind that
if this thing is reflecting, say, planets and stuff like that, well,
from a geocentric point of view, the movement of the
planets is not just a simple circle, right, I mean
you see them, they persiss and then they go backwards,

(19:18):
and the thing exactly so if you and there's a
fellow named Michael T. Wright who built a replica of
this device, and we'll talk more about him probably in
a bit, but he there's a great video that demonstrates
him using this machine to show the movement of these
different elements and sometimes you see them moving kind of

(19:39):
backward compared to other elements, and you think, wow, the
gears have to account for that too. The gears have
to be able to do very complex movements of these uh,
these these arms that are on these dials in order
to reflect what is really happening. And while the model
itself uh does depict a geocentric view of celestial bodies.

(20:02):
We can't be sure that the person who built it
necessarily ascribed necessarily ascribed to a geocentric philosophy. Oh, that's
certainly true because for the devices function, I mean it was,
it was functionally geocentric, right, because we're perving from exactly
even if the person who made it actually thought the

(20:23):
Earth went around the Sun, it would still look the
same pretty much, because if you're reflecting how the world,
how the how the celestial you know, elements look compared
to being on the Earth, it makes no sense to
make it anything other than geocentric. So the heliocentric theories
had been placed ahead of when we think this device

(20:43):
was made. So it's possible we don't know, because there
were still people who who ascribed to a geocentric worldview.
I'd probably say that was dominant, Yeah, because because it
was similar to what we would see centuries later, where
to propose such a thing as a helos heliocentric review
view would mean that you might suffer a little bit
of let's say, you might get ostracized with extreme prejudice

(21:08):
that people didn't like here in that Yeah, So anyway.
You know, it does look like it was going to
show you not only the Sun and Moon's movements, which
is already complex enough because they don't move at the
same you know rate, or you know they change positions,
uh differently relative to one another. Then to throw in
the other planets makes that or the plants that the

(21:29):
Greeks knew about, makes it even more complex. So here's
the question, does this count as a computer? I would
say absolutely. I would say so too, And I've got
a little argument here. Tell me what you think about
so um, I'd say the basic definition of a computer.
A lot of times it's included that it's electronic. But
let's take that part out and say, well, whether or

(21:51):
not it's electronic. Um, A computers like an interactive machine
that can and these words often come up, store, retrieve,
and process data. That's fair. Um. So it's like input,
output and processing and storage. Yeah. I always think of
it as something that can can take input, put it
through some form of algorithm, meaning a set of rules,

(22:14):
and then give you output on the other side. And
it's predictable. It's going to do that the same way,
like assuming that you put in the same input and
you're running it through the same algorithm, you're always going
to get the same output. Okay, so both definitions work
very well together. Yeah, I'd say the biggest distinction is
that today's computer as we think of as being general use.

(22:35):
So you you have hardware that can compute, but you've
also got software to boss the hardware around, so it
can tell it to compute in different ways. Right, So
in that way, you can have a single machine allow
you to do Excel spreadsheets or play you know, the
first person shooter game. Right, But obviously without electronics, this
this ancient computer doesn't have software. It just has hardware.

(22:58):
Or it's like thinking about a computer that can only
run one program, which is not that difficult to imagine.
I mean, if you if you think of calculators as
a subset of computers, calculators like your basic calculator. I'm
not talking about your super crazy calculators that have apps
on them and everything, but your basic calculator does basic
calculator functions. It's you know, again, taking that input, putting

(23:21):
it through an algorithm, some sort of mathematical process, and
you get an output similar to this device. Yeah, so
this device, it's like a computer that only has one job,
but within that job, I think it's definitely worth saying
it's a computer because its stores data. So the relationships
between the astronomical pathways are represented by the mechanical math

(23:43):
that's done between the teeth and the gears, so like
the gear sizes themselves are sort of storing that data.
Sure um, and then it takes input. You turn the
hand crank to give it the input of the date
you want to calculate, and then it gives you output
it's got. The dials reflect the computed values of the
of what you're looking for, and even as I have

(24:04):
said before, you could do it the other way, where
you keep turning the dial until you get the configuration
you were interested in and then you look at the date.
So it works in either sense, and uh, pretty phenomenal.
I mean, it's when you think about how precise you
have to be to make sure you get this, and
not only that, but just the huge amount of information

(24:25):
you have to have at your disposal to even start
in the craftsmanship of this thing. Because the Greeks had
a lot of information about astronomy, some of it they
got from the Babylonians. So the Babylonians were known as
very much interested in astronomy. The Greeks were as well,
and so they had to have had all this observation

(24:45):
data that they had, the things that they had observed
about the movement of celestial objects in the sky and
how those patterns would arise in order for them to
plan that out into a mechanical device. And that, to
me is really amazing because you're not talking about, oh,
you know, every four weeks, this one event happens. Now,

(25:06):
some of these cycles, like I said, are incredibly long.
You had a nineteen year cycle, you had a seventy
six year cycle, you had a fifty four year cycle.
All of these were taken into account to explain the
movement of celestial objects in various ways, whether it's a
solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse, or that you get
both a lunar and a solar eclipse within a certain

(25:26):
amount of time, not to mention the movement of the
other planets. That's a lot of information that you have
to have compiled before you ever cut into a sheet
of bronze. Uh. Yes, it certainly is. And and even
harder is imagining how you would begin to compute that data. Yeah,
I mean nobody. Um, well, actually this is a good question. Um,

(25:50):
had anybody ever made anything like this before? Obviously we
don't know for sure, right, well, we don't have evidence
this is the earliest existing device. In fact, we don't
have any other devices to point to. H And let's
be clear, when we're calling it the earliest known computer
that that doesn't mean we think that there's nothing that
like this that could have come before. It just means

(26:12):
the it's the earliest one that we have, so and
we don't have any others. It's not like there are
you know, twenty other examples of this. In fact, if
you want to look at for another object that's as
complex as this one, you have to go about fifteen
hundred years further into the early Renaissance and look at
the Middle East, China, and Europe for devices that start

(26:34):
to equal this level of complexity. However, these historians of
mechanical engineering, they say this kind of stuff doesn't show
up until late medieval clockwork. It's like, yeah, at the earliest. Yeah.
So when you take that into account, you think, well,
you know, is this is this an anomaly? Is it
a one Offit some mad genius come up with us.

(26:56):
But if you if you were to actually carefully examine
those gears and we'll more about how people have done
that over the last decade or so, if you were
to very carefully examine them, you would see that they
appear to have been made flawlessly, like there were no mistakes. Uh.
You know a lot of experts have said that if
you were to build, say a clock, and it's your

(27:18):
first clock, it may be a functional clock, but if
you were to look at the clockwork, you might see
where there were mistakes that were made and then corrected
for later on. There No, there's no evidence of that
in this device, which suggests that whoever built it had
done it at least a few times before to perfect
the whole process before building another one. Yeah, and combined

(27:39):
with the fact that this thing is just so smart
that it suggests it was probably not the only one
of its kind. It probably came from a line of
similar devices, maybe of advancing complexity. And you might think, well,
if this is the case where the heck is everything
else and well, some of it could just be lost
or destroyed. And also being made out of bronze means

(28:02):
that it's a valuable resource which occasionally for other purposes,
like I don't know, war, you would melt down so
that you could use it for other stuff. Yeah, I
mean think about we're talking about the first and second
century b C. In the Hellenistic world. I mean it's
it's a time when stuff might have gotten grabbed and
taken to another place, melted down, or just lost, just

(28:26):
like just like this one was lost. There's a lot
of stuff going on if you look at h and
we should mention this stuff you missed in history class.
Another sister podcast they did an episode on this same topic.
Fantastic episode, highly recommended. You should definitely go listen to it.
Um But one of the things they pointed out was
that if you look at bronze statues from that era,
they're very very few of them, and I think like

(28:49):
nine out of ten came from shipwrecks because the ones
that were left on land, more frequently than not had
been melted down for other purposes. So it's it's one
of those There was not necessarily a sense of permanency
in the time of the world. Okay, so we don't
have like, in terms of archaeology, another device like this
from the time, Has anybody ever described a device like

(29:12):
this from the time. Uh, that's a good question. Do
you have any actual information on that, because when I
was looking forward, I was it seemed to me at
the time that everyone was absolutely shocked by this device,
because it didn't seem to have any kind of shock,
shocked to the point where they were wondering if it
was perhaps a hoax, that maybe someone had planted this

(29:33):
thing and it was a fake. But it may be
that there are sources I'm I'm aware of. Do you
know any Well, I think there are ancient descriptions of
ore ries. Okay, so those are wouldn't be exactly like this,
but sort of ancient models of the movement of the
Planet's interesting. So yeah, and of course we do know
that there were philosophers who had described, uh, the very

(29:57):
motions that this device enacted. That that you they were
they were just describing it for scholarly purposes, and this
device would show that in action if you were to
move the handle. Well, here's an interesting question. Who built
this thing? Yeah? Where did it come from? We don't
We don't know, is the short answer. We have some suspicions. Uh,

(30:19):
sometimes the name Archimedes gets thrown around there. Yeah, so
one clue is just that Archimedes he was around, you know,
a century before this, and he was a genius inventor
and uh or at least we assume. So some of
his inventions we cannot actually be certain were ever built.

(30:41):
But sure, come on, he built a death ray, just
just a death ray, okay, probably and a giant a
giant arm that would upset besieging ships. I want to believe,
I understand. Okay, So, uh, well, is that the only
evidence that it might have been our Chimedes all No, Archimedes,

(31:01):
as you might remember, was from he lived in Syracuse
in the which is unfortunate. Yeah, well, unfortunate for our comedies.
Uh he lived in Syracuse. And an interesting fact about
the device that we discovered later is that, Okay, so
the device has inscriptions all over it, very faint inscriptions,
and they're hard to read because of all the corrosion

(31:23):
from the thousands of years. But what they discovered was, oh, okay,
actually we can make out some of these with some
of this imaging we're about to talk about in the
next section. And it's in coin a Greek. So that
was sort of like coin a Greek was the lingua
franca of the Hellenistic world. You know, people spoke it
all over the place. But the calendar that was represented

(31:46):
on here reflected the kind of calendar that would be
used in the Ionian area, which would include Syracuse. Right,
So that that gives at least some again circumstantial evidence
that perhaps our comedies could have been involved in this.
Then I again, our comedies probably died too early to
have made this particular device due to an over zealous soldier.

(32:08):
We know he died in hink to twelve BC and
the device was made in the probably sometimes between. So yeah,
that does put some he died too early to have
personally made it, right, Maybe he made an earlier one. Yeah,
And that's one idea is that it could have come
out of a sort of a Syracuse based school of

(32:32):
our comedies maybe. And again, the Island of Rhodes is
another example that people have have presented saying that they
were very much on that island. There was a scholarly
center that was devoted to astronomy, and that they also
had craftsmen who worked in clockwork type devices. So it's
possible that it could have originated from that area. We

(32:55):
just we don't know. There's some clues there, but we
don't know for sure. Yeah. Another name I just want
to mention real quick that gets brought up is Hipparcos.
Hipparcos Hippocus of of Nicia. And he was a Greek
astronomer um and geographer, and he did the maths. He
was a smart guy trigonometry right, yeah, he he was

(33:18):
also uh, he wasn't Hippocrates, but anyway, he he. He
also was known for describing the movements of the sun
in the moon right and uh. And some indications that
it maybe could have had something to do with him,
or that the astronomical theories that are reflected in this,
including like the movement of the moon, reflects his thoughts

(33:41):
about the movement. So it may not be that he
had a direct hand in it, but that perhaps a
student or someone familiar with his work took the theory
and put it into a physical object. Okay, but I
have another theory about who created it. Yeah, I have
a feeling. I know what you're gonna say, but hit
me with it, buddy. Okay, Well, it goes like this,

(34:03):
this mechanism is way too advanced to have been built
by human beings at the time. Obviously it was built
by a aliens be time traveler see transdimensional reptilians. Right,
so um or or sorry d um, like a super
advanced secret human society that we don't know about, like Atlantis,

(34:27):
but we do know about them, we don't think they exist,
all right? So all right, And Joe, I know you're
you're presenting this as an in tongue in cheek because
you and I share a common opinion on this about
how it's absolutely ridiculous nonsense to assume this. Yeah, for
one thing, it it really it really says a lot

(34:47):
about the cynicism of people when it comes to the
creativity of human beings and ingenuity and our ability to
process complex thoughts and bring them into reality, you know,
I mean it's the same our men that no, the Pyramids,
no human could have built those. Actually thousands of humans
built those. Tens of thousands of humans built those. Yeah,

(35:09):
it's um. It's not like somebody in ancient Greece building
a warp drive, right, It's it's somebody who was building
something that was totally available to someone with the technology
of the time. All they had to be was really
really smart, right, Yeah. They We know that the astronomical
knowledge was there, you know, the scholarship was there. We
know that the bronze working was there. We know that

(35:32):
people there were craftsmen who generally it wasn't as good
as this, right, but there were craftsmen who could create
incredible works. A lot of bronze U Now, a lot
of those even't survived because of again the fact that
people would melt stuff down. But the ones that have
survived have shown that there's you know, there has there
was a level of artistry there. Yeah, it's I think
the bottom line is it's quite exceptional for its time,

(35:55):
but it's not unthinkable. And so we are discounting the
uh the alien slash time travel or slash reptilian, so
whatever I mean. If it was from aliens, you'd think that,
you know, it would reflect a little more complete astronomical knowledge.
You might be electronic or something. Also, it wouldn't be geocentric.

(36:17):
Really talked about it, you know, it's functionally geocentric, even
though the person who made it might have been right,
But why would an alien bother to make something from
Earth's perspective when oh, yeah, they could make an oory
from the outside right, including the Earth revolving around the Sun. Yeah,
why would they do? Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't
make sense to me, not knowing about planets past Saturn.

(36:37):
You know, maybe they just thought those were those were
not really high up on the list. Yeah, you don't wanna,
you don't want to visit those. Yeah, So I think
we can discount the whole alien hypothesis. So we've got
more we want to talk about exactly. We want to
we want to cover how it is that we actually
know this stuff. But before we get into that, let's
take another quick break and thank our sponsor. So, like

(36:59):
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So go to www dot trunk club dot com and
check that out. All right, So we have discussed what
it was, we discussed how it worked. How do we
know that it did this thing? I mean, you know,

(38:05):
you're talking about a giant hunk of corroded bronze. How
could you possibly ever figure out what this thing actually did?
As we already mentioned, people originally did not know. They
had no idea what this hunk was capable of. For
a century, we really didn't know. We had some people
make some guesses occasionally, but for the most part, it
wasn't until we were able to use something far more

(38:29):
sophisticated than just our own eyeballs to look at it.
We had to use X rays, and with the X rays. Initially,
the X rays showed that there were lots of gears
inside this hunk of corroded bronze, and that they were
connected in some way. But those early X rays were
not perfect. Mostly they due to the fact that you
couldn't tell depth with it, so you couldn't see how

(38:50):
the gears were connected. It was like a massive gears,
but you weren't sure where where they were in relation
to one another. Um. But enter something called three D
X ray. Yeah, where you starized homography. Yeah you started, yes,
scanning it from all different angles using different approaches. Did
you did you come across the powerful X ray machines
called blade Runner? I didn't. Yeah, yeah, so blade Runner

(39:12):
X ray machines. A sorry. They used lots of different
X ray machines throughout the study of this device. As
we began to learn that this was far more important
from a historical perspective than anyone had had thought leading
up to this. I mean everyone was thinking that these
other artifacts were really important and this other thing was
a curiosity. But as we learned more about it, we realized, WHOA,
this thing is amazing. Uh. Well, the the various X

(39:37):
ray devices we use showed more of the relation of
all these different gears, so we got to see how
they were laid out inside this hunk of corroded bronze.
But the blade Runner device, all right, So it was
an X ray machine that was designed to look for
tiny cracks in turbine blades. That's what the original design

(39:57):
of these machines was for, and to tell whether or
not you're replicant. Also to tell whether Yeah, I would
ask you, if a turtle is on its back, what
do you do? Why doesn't mechanism turn the turtle over? Yeah?
So anyway, it would look for these tiny It was
designed so that you could detect the tiniest of cracks
and turbine blades, so that you could do maintenance before
a catastrophic failure. They used it to look at this device,

(40:19):
the anti antikythera device. We keep avoiding saying it so
that I don't fall over myself. Let's say it three
times together, Jonathan, Okay, so that's fantastic, all right, Now
you have to say it backwards. No, um, So the
antikythera device, the blade Runner thing, it looks at it

(40:41):
and it actually is able to see because it has
such precise measurements. It's able to to to distinguish what
the tiny shallow carvings are on those dials. That's how
we were able to read the word inscription. The inscriptions, yeah,
because some of them were just verry faded already, even

(41:02):
before you talk about the corrosion effort in there or
element in there, i should say, and the blade runner
X rays were able to measure these very tiny changes
in the surface of these different dials, and that's how
we were able to see what the writing was and
thus able to really um translated and figure out what

(41:22):
this thing actually did. And that's how people once they
started reading it, Once they started being able to read
the writing, it became clear that this was a far
more sophisticated device than what what predecessors were thinking. Even
the earliest guesses were things that probably can predict solar
and lunar movements, or maybe it's some form of calendar,

(41:45):
but it no one was really aware of how sophisticated
it was until we were able to take this closer look.
And I think it's pretty phenomenal what we've learned about
it so far, Like those shallow engravings have told us
pretty much everything we need to know about its basic function,
and that's how we're able to draw some conclusions and

(42:05):
clear the conclusions that lad Michael t right to build
his replica of the device to the point where he's
got a working replica. Uh it as far as we
can tell, it's as accurate to the original as we
can possibly get. Yeah, you should look this up on
YouTube and see it, because it's not just a model,

(42:27):
it is a working replica. He built the machine. He
used very similar methods as to what the ancient Greeks
would have. He used the same sort of dimension of gears. Uh.
You know, keeping in mind that we don't he's working
from an incomplete model. Even with our very very sophisticated
techniques these days, you can't see what's not there, right,

(42:48):
there's still some missing pieces that we don't really have.
You know, he was able to recreate it based upon
what we think the device was meant to do and
his works and then the videos are amazing. When you
watch the just the minute movements of each of these
pieces in relation to one another and think of how
complex this is, it's mind blowing. It's well, and it's

(43:09):
also it's a it's a gorgeous device. You know, it's
just it's a beautiful device. You would look at and
you might think Originally, if you were just a glance
at it, you might think it was either a really
weird clock or maybe some sort of navigational equipment for
like a ship or something, just because you've got bronze
and wood there. But um, yeah, once you get a
deeper understanding of what it is, it's pretty pretty nifty.

(43:31):
I think the replica was made with brass instead of products.
I think you're right. I think it was brass instead
of bronze. So yeah, even more ship like then with
the brass and would combination. Yeah. Uh. There's recent scholarship
going on with a project called the Anti Kit through
a Mechanism research project that's a collaborative project between lots
of different research organizations and individuals. Yeah, there's a mathematician

(43:56):
named Tony Freethe and uh he's been using imaging technology
to get to the bottom of questions that remain about
the mechanism. Yeah. They the group. The research group was
founded in two thousand five and has been extremely active.
They have sponsored several museum exhibitions throughout the world. I

(44:18):
think right now as the record of this podcast. At
least some of the device is on display in uh
in a museum in Athens, but I believe that ends
in January. Yeah, it's the it's an exhibition called the
Antikittheras Shipwreck, the ship, the treasures and the mechanism, and
it's at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. YEA.

(44:39):
And so that of course has more than than the
device itself. It also has examples of the other stuff
that was found at shipwreck, which, by the way, people
have gone back to that shipwreck and found more things
around it since that initial discovery. UM, and so there's there.
There's also been a lot of symposia that they've held.

(45:01):
They've had a lot of gatherings where they they combine
research and they published that research. There's lots of information
on their website about the device and the circumstances around
its discovery and just the process of discovery as we
used more and more sophisticated techniques to examine it, and
it's really a great resource. I highly recommend visiting that website.

(45:24):
I'll link to that on our Facebook page and Twitter
handle so you guys can see it. Because it's pretty
neat stuff. I mean, it's um, you know, I really
enjoyed reading about the process they went through as they
would learn more and more, and of course that hasn't finished.
In fact, there's there's one thing, one question besides who

(45:44):
built it, that we don't know the answer to yet,
which is why did they build it? Like? Why is it?
Was it? What? What was the in purpose? Was it
a scholarly tool? Was it so that they could uh create,
you know, specifically plan out events to coincide with celestial events,
so that perhaps it was a political tool. You know,
maybe if if an eclipse is seen as a bad omen,

(46:07):
you may want to avoid planning some big event around
an eclipse just so that people don't think that the
event itself is cursed. I mean, it's I'm sure in
the ancient world you could probably get some amount of
power just by being able to accurately predict eclipses. Yeah, yeah,
And that's another possibility. It could just be religious power

(46:28):
or political power. We don't know, And it's possible that
as much as we can learn about this device, maybe
we never really figure out with any degree of certainty
who built it or why it was built. In fact,
I'd be amazed if we ever are able to figure
out who built it. That would be phenomenal to me.
Unless someone's like, oh, look here there's an inscription on
the bottom Johan from Sweden. What that would be a

(46:53):
big upset, But not that I think that would ever happen.
But um, yeah, it was want to float. Another possibility steampunks, right,
so steampunk cost players. Yeah, but I'm thinking that it
was a steampunk convention. A certain doctor showed up at
it accidentally ended up grabbing this device, and on a

(47:16):
further adventure, maybe three episodes down the line, ended up
accidentally dunking it into the ocean off the coast degrease.
That's exactly what happened. Um explains everything. Uh did you
see the the lego? Really cool? Now? This wasn't We
probably might not want to call it a replica because
it's not trying to copy the form of the original,

(47:38):
just the function, right, And even the function it was
I think a limited part of it because it was
really showing things like eclipses in the Uh, in the
lego version, I don't think it necessarily showed all the
movements that the antikithera device showed because I was when
I watched the video is that this is really clever
because it would show you the the date and uh

(48:00):
when the next eclipse would occur, whether it was solar
or Luna or both. But it didn't um both as
in like the region of time when both would occur,
not both occurring at the same time, UM necessarily. But
the the it didn't tell you things. It didn't tell
you things like the movement of the planets as far
as I could tell. So it was it had a

(48:23):
limited set of functions that the anti killer device actually did.
But it was still really cool to watch. It was
really cool. Let me tell you, I'm going to invent
a device and it's gonna tell you it'll predict when
the Sun passes in front of the moon. That will
be a bad day. I'm gonna make sure I stay
indoors that day. What is that called? That's called I

(48:46):
think that's I think that's called Well, it doesn't really
matter because we're in it's essentially called boy, it's sure
as vaporized outside today, isn't it. Yeah, I know that
would not not go over. Well. We have a little
bit more to say. In that classic episode of the
Antikithera mechanism. But first, let's take another quick break. Now,

(49:10):
when we recorded this episode, the belief was that the
device dates from around one b C E. The researchers
now believe that it's actually even older, dating from two
oh five b c E. Now, the researchers came to
this conclusion once they determined that the anti Cithera mechanism
was time to begin with events starting in two oh

(49:33):
five b C and not just the year. They figured
out that the whole device worked best if we use
May twelve, two oh five b c E as the
starting date as the first full moon of May. By
the way, now, the researchers Christianne C. Carmen and James
Evans used a system that looked at different possible starting

(49:54):
dates and they eliminated the ones that didn't seem to
fit the mechanisms operation. The date of May twelve, two
oh five b C was the one that was left up.
So why is this new information so cool? Well, for
one thing, it tells us that the person who designed
the mechanism wasn't relying on Greek trigonometry, which didn't exist
in two oh five b C. Instead, this brilliant inventor

(50:17):
was using Babylonian arithmetic to determine the dates of various
celestial events. Now it also puts the device's creation closer
to the time of our comedes, who remember died into
twelve BC. Now I felt all this information was really
interesting and merited a revisit to our Antikythera device. I

(50:37):
hope you enjoyed that classic episode. I told you I
would have a little bit of an update, and I
do so. Researchers at University College London's Anti Cithera research
team have the well they believe that they have created
a replica, computer simulation replica of the gear works of

(50:58):
the anti Cithera mechanism. They studied the mechanism, the surviving
parts thoroughly. They looked at what we believe it was
supposed to be able to do, and then they kind
of reverse engineered that to determine the sort of gears
that would have been necessary in order to accomplish what

(51:20):
this device was supposed to do, and that has resulted
in this computer simulation model of it. It's really fascinating
stuff and if they are correct with their hypotheses, it
really points out not just how ingenious the engineers were
to create such a thing, but obviously how accurate the

(51:43):
observations had to be in order for this to even
be a starting point in the first place, Keeping in
mind the accuracy of those observations were also hinged upon
the incorrect belief that the Earth was the center of
the solar system. So that does that does change things
a little bit, I would argue, But really a fascinating development.

(52:06):
And if you're interested, you can go and seek out
the reports from the University College London's and Tokithera research team.
They have written about it extensively. There are a lot
of pieces about the cosmos according to the ancient Greeks
that really gives us some insight into the thought process

(52:28):
at the time. So I highly recommend you check that out.
I will have that second part of the General Motors
founding up very soon. I apologize for its delay. If
it had not been for some unfortunate internet outages in
my neighborhood, I would have had that up already. But

(52:50):
such is the way of things. And uh, and while
I know a lot of stuff, I do not magically
have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that happened in the
early nine hundreds with general motors. I just haven't filled
out that part of my brain yet, but we're getting there.
If you have any suggestions for topics I should tackle
in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me

(53:12):
and let me know. The best way to do that
is over on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff H
s W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,

(53:32):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.