Antikythera Mechanism made of Lego

Not too long ago Roberta X posted a video of a functional replication of Charles Babbage's computing machine made out of Meccano. Poking around on the web this afternoon I came across this video of a functional duplicate of the Antikythera Mechanism made out of Legos.



I put up not one, but two other posts about this device. Turns out that the guy who made the Lego version also made a Lego version of Babbage's machine.

Meanwhile Jo Marchant (who wrote the book Decoding The Heavens) tells us that maybe the design is not Greek, but Babylonian, and may be centuries older than we thought.

Ancient Machine Work

The Ancient Invisible Fastening Pins of The Antikythera Mechanism
Clickspring Clips

I'm not sure, but it kind of looks like this guy is trying to reproduce the Antikythera Mechanism using just hand tools. Going by the amount of work he's doing to accomplish this one little step, it's probably going to take him a couple of years to complete it.

Antikythera Mechanism

Antikythera Mechanism V2: A Modernized Reproduction
Spencer Connor

This is just amazing. He ties the astronomy, math and mechanics all together. I've put up a couple of other posts about this machine.

"Decoding the Heavens" by Jo Marchant

"Decoding the Heavens" by Jo Marchant, the story of the Antikythera mechanism. This book is amazing on a number of different levels. Unfortunately, the writing style is not one of them. It seems to follow the breathless potboiler model of some of the mass market stuff like "The DaVinci Code". (Did I mention how much I hated that book? Oh, I did? Sorry, but I really didn't like it. Good story, terrible writing. What is happening in the publishing industry? Don't ask if you don't want to know.)

Anyway, the story is stupendous, the level of science and technology involved in this tale is tremendous. It's like a short course in the development of technology during the 20th century. It also looks at the people and politics involved which gives some insight into academic competition.

It also opens the door to creating a new vision of the city (Atlantis?) that was destroyed by a eruption of a volcano on the of island of Thera in the Eastern Mediterranean around 3500 years ago.

This story seems to be having a hard time gaining traction, and it makes me wonder about people. The stories we have been telling ourselves about the ancient world (anytime before the year zero), all seem to involve massive buildings, massive sculptures and massive armies, but technology was extremely limited. The wheel was like the most sophisticated tool they had. Bronze was used for making swords and shields. Any kind of mechanical technology simply did not exist.

But the Antikythera mechanism changes all that. We have known about the mechanism for over 100 years, but our story about the ancients has not changed one wit. Why is that? Are the historians so wedded to their stories they cannot accept that they might be in error? Or maybe no one cares.

I think this device is very significant and we should be thinking about what it means. Of course, I also like it that it gives some support to my conspiracy theory about the Egyptians and their hieroglyphics.



Update March 2016 replaced missing picture.

The Antikythera Mechanism

I remember hearing about this a few years ago. At the time there was a bunch of hype, but not much real information about the mechanism, at least not that I found in the fifteen minutes I devoted to the task. The existence of the original upsets our established view of ancient history. I don't think historians have quite come to grips with it yet.

Via Neatorama.

More Stone Age

See the 1,000-Year-Old Windmills Still in Use Today | National Geographic
National Geographic
Stu visited some old windmills and posted some photos.

Driven shaft and exposed gearbox in Salzkotten

This picture shows the bevel gears being used to drive the grindstone, which makes me wonder how they accomplished this before iron gears were something a farmer could afford. I mean, if the ancients could build the Antikythera mechanism they would surely have had the ability to make big bevel gears. But after that, nobody mentions gears until Leonardo starts putting them in his designs around 1500 and it wasn't until the 19th Century that we got the hobbing machine which automatically cuts metal gears. So I'm thinking the probably started casting gears around 1700. For a large, crude mechanism such as this mill casting should have been adequate.

We've been grinding wheat for thousands of years, so what did they do before 1700 to drive the grindstone? 

Wooden cogwheel driving a lantern pinion or cage gear

You could use wooden gears.

Cast iron mortise wheel with wooden cogs meshing with a cast iron gear wheel

This one kind of confuses the issue, as we have an iron wheel with wooden teeth engaging an iron gear.

Or just use a windmill with a vertical axis so you don't need gears at all. That's what we have in the video above.