Posted 23-02-2017 at 19:46
The Antikithera mechanism is a true "out of place artefact" and it has boggled the minds of many clever people ( and people like me too)
This is a documentary from 2012 about it's discovery and decoding from the team of scientists that worked on it. Interesting stuff
There have been several reconstructions besides the one in the video, including one made of Lego.
This year another reconstruction is being built, in Australia. The process is being filmed on a weekly basis and the builder will attempt to follow the original design as closely as possible, sharing the problems and solutions of the original builder along the way.
I will add the weekly episodes here for anyone who's interested but they can also be viewed directly on youtube if you'd prefer.
The reconstructor goes under the name of Clickspring, and he has a host of other builds to his name that can also be viewed. The quality of workmanship and photography is first class.
This is the introductory video
And the first two episodes
Feel free to comment
cerrig
[ This message was edited by: cerrig on 2020-12-13 10:22 ]
Posted 24-02-2017 at 00:16
haven't watched the vids but is the mechanism out of place/time? Some people think there were more than one, which makes sense, and that Archimedes had one of them.
Posted 24-02-2017 at 11:05
The first video is an entertaining story about the mechanism's history and the methods used to decode it. It is proposed in there that Archimedes may have been the inventor, but regardless of who it actually was the technology involved in it's making and designing are difficult to fit into that era and nothing like it was seen again for hundreds of years.
This is the Lego one, using standard gears, meaning there are twice as many needed as the original in order to get the correct ratios.
Posted 25-02-2017 at 11:01
This is an old History channel video giving some background to the evolution of time measurement in Ancient Greece. Water clocks of an ever increasing complexity in evidence before the time of Archimedes, who studied them.
Also a bit more on the history of the study of the Antikithera mechanism from the 1970's, and the first replica.
Michael Wright, who has made several replicas using the tools and methods of Ancient Greece, it seems doesn't believe the device is so spectacular. He is of the opinion that it's to be expected given the knowledge of Astronomy and technology of that time.
cerrig
[ This message was edited by: cerrig on 2017-03-08 13:25 ]
Posted 25-02-2017 at 11:43 a few more factoids--
the Greek water clock guy, Ctesibius, 250BC also designed a water pump, one of which was found at Calleva. This enabled a large town to flourish in 50BC where there was no nearby water source. A town that had shellfish, Mediterranian herbs, olive oil, wine, Irish gold.
The water clock was not equalled until Huygens 1656. The modern precision clockmakers Hublot struggled to replicate the Antikithera gear mechanism. i'm not sure if anyone has tried to make a replica of the dagger decorated with thousands of tiny gold pins, found at Bush Barrow. no wonder half the human race is myopic! sat int' cave sewing.
Posted 25-02-2017 at 12:07
That's the first time I've seen the Irish linked to the Antikithera mechanism, but they have been linked to the Egyptians so who knows. That little black and white ball might just be a timer for guiness fermentation. This explains the obsession with liquid dispensers.
I like this theory, it's got legs. All the gearing is to tell Andropolus Murphy when to add the different secret ingredients that make up the magic brew.
Posted 08-03-2017 at 12:50
Just stumbled across this thread ...
My take is that the Antikithera Mechanism is neither 'Amazing', nor 'Astonishing in its manufacture'.
The gears are hardly perfect and it was probably only good for 4 or 5 years at a stretch - at best - before having to be reset. Perhaps even re-built.
The mythos surrounding it is simply that we couldn't imagine anyone would have had the technology and/or know-how to build it that far back.
As with many other examples, the Old Ones continue to surprise us.
i've a sneaky suspicion the Romans had a bit to do with it-tended to have a battle tactic of culture destruction. then they invented a christian church empire which hated science so much that it called curiosity the greatest evil.
Please don't misunderstand me. The point of my post was not to denigrate the Mechanism. It's an amazing device, but the mythos surrounding it borders on veneration.
There may not be much between the two devices because we haven't found it yet?
Posted 09-03-2017 at 14:33
Apologies Neil, I'm in full sympathy with your point but it warranted a counter view, that's all , it's my reply that has the misunderstanding about it.
The missing devices that would be expected to follow on from the Antikithera mechanism is a mystery. Going by the developments made in the Industrial revolution alone an evolving understanding of mechanisms would have been expected, but this doesn't appear to have happened, either before or after the Antikithera. As things stand it is in a bit of a bubble historically.
It isn't until the fall of the Western Roman empire that another similar but less sophisticated device turns up, which is curious given Drolafs post.
Posted 10-03-2017 at 23:32
we don't know what the Gauls and Iberians had, apart from the golden calendar hats, as the Romans melted all the gold artefacts down, and possibly much of it went to China in exchange for silk.
Posted 11-03-2017 at 22:19
Here's the next instalment of the replica build. In this 11 minute video Chris the builder explores some possible technology that may have been used to manufacture the parts, from casting Bronze to a simple type of vice, showing it's use on one of the toothed wheels.
cerrig
[ This message was edited by: cerrig on 2020-12-13 10:24 ]
[ This message was edited by: cerrig on 2020-12-13 10:32 ]
Posted 20-04-2017 at 15:39
This is a documentary by Nova about the history of navigation at sea and some of the issues that it presents, mainly the problem of knowing the Longitude, and how it was finally solved by John Harrisons H4 watch.
It isn't about the Antikythera mechanism as such, but there are many similarities within the design parameters of both the Antikythera mechanism and John Harrisons watch which are interesting.
I think I recognise some of the characters in the "Longitude Asylum" at the beginning of the video, and if you've ever wondered why speed at sea is measured in knots it's in this too.
Posted 21-04-2017 at 08:33
Thanks for that vid Cerrig. Very interesting on the making of accurate gears having cut many myself when employed in engineering. With a milling machine, a dividing head and a perfectly shaped cutter. Apart from that the design of gears is quite complex. Number of teeth and the pitch circle diameter determines the diameter of the disc. Then there's the problem of centre distances between two or more gears. The vid gave the wrong impression of cutting the blank first and then deciding the size of the teeth. That's what happens when archaeologists are not engineers. But it was a good video all the same. Cutting teeth with a file, Yeah! and John Harrisons would have used the same method. No machinery for him. You may have seen this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9dso7ATlSk Story of Harrison
Posted 21-04-2017 at 11:42
I hadn't seen that series before Roy, thanks for that.
Being an ex engineer like yourself I am also interested in how the machine was built, the method and the means, the objective and the difficulties. You know the sort of thing, a device is needed to carry out a task and it has to perform under certain restrictions, which could be size, materials, environment, speed or any number of other issues.
These are problems that engineers come up against every day, and as you will know there is always more than one solution and sometimes the best available method isn't always the most practical method to use.
Modern clockmakers employ all sorts of aids to ensure their mechanisms fit accurately, like this one...
I will be interested to see how Clickspring gets around the manufacturing problems without using modern advantages.
It would be difficult to fit a definite number of teeth around an arbitrary diameter without figuring out the size and form of teeth first, especially as those teeth would have to match something else. That sort of issue is where drawing on the generations of previous problem solvers coming up with solutions comes in handy. This is why the Antikythera mechanism is so enigmatic, where is the development ?
I wouldn't knock Archaeologists being Engineers too much. John Harrison was a carpenter who solved the Longitude problem when the clockmakers and astronomers of the day failed, so it is possible to cross borders successfully sometimes.
Posted 22-04-2017 at 01:02
I wouldn't knock Archaeologists being Engineers too much. No, these were pretty good just that one point I picked. Maybe they did have knowledge of enginnering which wasn't put into the vid. First design your tooth. then knowing the number of gears you want and the number of teeth on each. calculate the PCDs Then your OD. Then work out the arrangements and finally your centre distances. easy. I didn't know that Harrison clocks were made from wood until I saw that vid Longitude. What a genius to be able to match grains to combat shrinkage. And use lignum vitae for self lubricating bearings. A modern Archimedes.
The archaeologists I do knock are those Egyptologists that insist on bronze chisels and dolorite balls for hammers to shape hard rocks. Even a bit of knowledge of Moh's scale would show that they are wrong.
[ This message was edited by: rbatham on 2017-04-22 01:08 ]
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Posted 23-02-2017 at 19:46 
