What Did the Real Antikythera Mechanism Do And Who Actually Made It?

in 2023 is Indiana Jones and the dial of Destiny the latest entry in the iconic Adventure film series everyone's favorite swash sparkling archeologist SLG grave robber hunts down the titular dial mechanism invented by ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes to predict the appearance of fishes in time allowing the user to travel between the present and the past because I mean sure why not but while this Fantastical plot element might sound like the product of a particularly drunken session of Antiquities themed Mad Libs amazingly it is actually based on a real life artifact called the antium mechanism dating from the 1 Century BC this incredibly sophisticated assembly of bronze gears has baffled archaeologists for over a century predating the earliest known mechanisms of its kind by more than a millennium only in recent years has its true function been determined revealed to be an ancient form of analog computer the oldest on record this is the story of the most incredible example of ancient mechanical and mathematical genius ever discovered so let's dive in shall we just before we go back to Simon in today's video are two of your favorite pastimes fishing and staring at your phone because I don't mean to alarm everyone out there but there is literally a free app for that today's sponsor fishing Clash which combines both of these enjoyable activities all without having your finger smell like fish and tackle in the aftermath if only that could be said for all other entertainment activities for those unfamiliar fishing class is a free realistic fishing game played by an astounding 80 million people in 171 countries available on iOS and andro Android the game allows you to virtually fish all over the globe without stepping out of your door such a nice feature there are literally people out there after all I really don't recommend it and don't even get us started with that glowing orb in the sky bent on killing us all with its deadly cancer rays and its inevitable 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Demetrius contos decided to try his lck in the waters off the island and sent diver Elia statos down to search for sponges minutes later visibly shaken statos suddenly resurfaced frantically exclaiming that the seaf Flor was strewn with dead naked bodies when his fellow divers investigated they discovered that the bodies were in fact large bronze and marble statues the cargo of an ancient shipwreck lying 45 M below the surface upon reaching their home Port the crew reported their Discovery to the Greek archaeological service who in 1901 launched an expedition to antia over the course of eight months the team recovered thousands of artifacts including magnificent statues Pottery jewelry and glassware from these finds the wreck was determined to be a Roman ship from the 2nd century B.C its cargo of fine and expensive art objects likely destined for a wealthy buyer in Rome then on May the 17th 1902 archaeologist Valerio sty was cleaning some of the many corroded lumps of metal from the wreck when he discovered something completely unexpected a fused mass of complex inter meshing bronze gears and wheels like a large mechanical clock while the ancient Greeks were known to have used simple Peg toothed gears for machines like water wheels and windmills the Precision of these gears was unlike anything yet discovered from the period sparking Furious debate among archaeologists many refused to believe that the ancient Greeks could have created such a sophisticated device declaring the mechanism to be a forgery or aate device that conveniently sank in the same area as the wreck others argued it was the remains of a particularly complex astrolab a common ancient device for making astronomical measurements and calculations or while still others believed it to be a planetarium or an orary mechanical model showing the motion of the planets meanwhile in 1905 a German philologist named Arthur re conducted the first in-depth analysis of the mysterious device observing that many of the gears and the remains of the wooden box that held them were covered in Greek writing ree attempted to translate as much of the text as possible what he discovered was part of an ancient Almanac known as a parapo which predicted various astronomical phenomenon such as equinox's solstices and the rising and setting of various constellations he also discovered the names of the five planets known to the ancient Greeks Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter and Saturn and that certain key numbers particularly 1976 and 223 appeared several times throughout the mechanism but perhaps Ream's greatest observation was that not all the gears in the mechanism were simply fixed to to the wooden base instead some rotated on or within other gears forming epicyclic gear sets this was a startling Discovery for epicyclic Gears would not appear again in the West for another 1500 years all this led room to speculate that the anti-ia mechanism was indeed a planetarium or other kind of calculator for predicting astronomical events however unable to penetrate the thick corrosion incasing the mechanism and more coly examine its components he made no further progress and the anti kythera mechanism soon faded Into Obscurity things changed in 1951 when the mechanism was rediscovered by Professor Derek DOA price a British physicist and historian of Technology working at Yale University price immediately became obsessed with this ancient Enigma and devoted much of the next 20 years to cracking its many Mysteries he was aided in his quest by two key developments though the anti-ia mechanism had been recovered in 1901 as one solid corroded lump over the intervening half century it had broken into around 20 smaller fragments revealing more of its inner workings advancements in x-ray technology also made it possible to look inside the larger concretions without damaging them further do Sola price therefore teamed up with Greek radiologist charalambos carak caros to take the first detailed 2D X-rays of the mechanism these not only reveals 10 previously unknown gears but also hundreds more Greek characters providing vital Clues to deciphering the mechanism for example on the surviving fragments of the front outer D DOA price discovered the words pachon Pan and epy the 9th 10th and 11th months of the ancient Egyptian lunar calendar meanwhile the inner front D was divided into 360° as well as 12 segments marked with the signs of the zodiac the D also featured 20 individual letters which do Sola price realized corresponded to Arthur's parega Almanac from these Clues do Sola price determined that the front D of the mechanism tracked the side ra motion of the Sun and the Moon that is their motion relative to the so-called fixed Stars the two pointers that once traveled across the dial however had long ago eroded away also lost to history was a hand crank on the side of the case which do Sola price determines through context must have driven the entire mechanism another key feature of the front D was the rotating outer ring which allowed the operator to account for the effects of leap years and the inter calorie month the four to five days added to the end of the Sonic year to synchronize it with the tropical year examining the x-rays the solid price and Cara Carlos next set about counting the teeth on each of the gears which was vital for determining exactly which astronomical Cycles the mechanism was intended to model this proved more challenging than expected as many of the gears were only partially preserved and since a difference of just one tooth could entirely throw off the analysis of the mechanism the analysis ran into many frustrating dead ends for example carac caros believed that one particular gear had 128 teeth while do Sola price believed that it had 127 do Sola price turned out to be correct for 127 is half of 254 the number of tropical or solar months in the metonic cycle first discovered by the ancient babyon Ians but named after 5th Century BCE Greek astronomer meton of Athens the metonic cycle is a period of 19 solar years or 235 CTIC or lunar months after which the phases of the moon occur at the same time of year the same number 19 that Arthur had discovered repeated throughout the mechanism the matonic cycle is still used today by many religions to determine the dates of certain holidays including Easter rosashana and Ramadan this particular 254 tooth gear drove a pointer on the rear upper face of the mechanism which indicated all the lunar months in a single 235 month matonic cycle finally building from Arthur's insights about epicyclic gear sets to Soler price concluded that these mechanisms were used to calculate the phases of the moon in 1974 he published his 20 years of findings in a landmark paper titled gears from the Greeks to Sol Price's paper shook the world of archaeology causing many to rethink their assumptions about the mathematical and Engineering abilities of the ancient Greeks it also inspired many researchers to tackle the puzzle of the anti kther mechanis M among these was Michael Wright a curator at the science museum in London one of wri's key insights was that the science museum had in its collection a similar artifact of the antia mechanism a 6th Century C device known as the Byzantine Sundar calendar when the mechanism is spun the name of the month appears in one window while a graphical representation of the moon's phases appears in another while the mechanism is relatively simple containing only eight gears compared to the antia mechanisms 30 the similarities between the two designs suggest that the Byzantine Sundar calendar was part of a long engineering tradition stretching back to the Antique ithera mechanism and even Beyond this along with the discovery of a new mechanism on the front dial ledri to hypothesize that the moon pointer on this dial included a rolling spherical indicated to display the phases of the moon incredibly this mechanism made use of a differential gear train a technology not previously thought to have been invented until the 16th century in the early 1900s Wright along with Australian historian of Technology Alan George Bromley performed linear x-ray tomography of the antium mechanism obtaining even more detailed easier to interpret 3D scans from these scans the pair was able to determine that much of the solar Price's analysis of the mechanism was fundamentally flawed with 17 out of his 20 gear tooth counts proving to be incorrect based on his more accurate counts as well as inscriptions found by Arthur Rain r hypothesized that the front dial also featured pointers now lost representing the orbits of the five known planets the motion of which was informed by the theories of ancient Greek Astron omous appolus of perger and hipparchus of RADS the ancient Greeks knew that the planets sped up or slowed down and sometimes even reverse direction as they orbited a phenomenon known as retrograde motion caused by the Earth overtaking the planets as it orbits around the Sun indeed the word planet from the Greek planetes or Wanderer is derived from this behavior however the ancient Greeks believed in a geocentric model of the solar system wherein the sun moon and planets orbited the Earth so account for retrograde motion apollenus and hipparchus theorized that the planets not only traveled in circular orbits around the Earth but also in smaller epicycles attached to set orbits but not an accurate literal representation of the solar system this model was mathematically accurate enough to perform practical astronomical calculations and to be mechanically modeled by epicyclic gear sets like in the anti theum mechanism the epicyclic gear system would remain the dominant model of the solar system for more than a millennium and a half until it was finally overturned by cernus Galileo and others in the 16th and 17th centuries R and bromley's 3D scans led to a number of other key discoveries such as the fact that the two DARS on the rear of the mechanism were not concentric circles as had previously been assumed but rather spirals furthermore the pointers on these dos were telescopic and featured a peg that rode in a groove on the spiral dial allowing them to expand and contract as they traveled around the dials this clever Arrangement allowed much longer and accurate measurement scales to be compressed into a more compact space r and Bromley also discovered a small D within the Luna D which appeared to measure the 76e cipic cycle named after Greek astronomer cippus this cycle represents the common multiple of the tropical or solar year and the codic or lunar month and is a more accurate Improvement on the Babylonian 19-year matonic cycle it also corresponded with the number 76 which Arthur found repeated throughout the mechanism based on all these discoveries in 1997 wri constructed the first practical working model of the antique ithera mechanism another researcher who was skep I of do solar Price's initial findings was Dr Tony free a British mathematician and documentary filmmaker upon reading the solar Price's 1974 paper free citing Arkham raser found the notion of using epicyclic and differential gears to determine the phases of the moon to a necessarily complex to be true after all there were much simpler and more efficient mechanical means of obtaining these values which any competent Greek mathematician would have known in any event in 2000 frean a team of British and Greek researchers formed the antiy theum mechanism research project and launched a fresh assault on the enigmatic mechanism Secrets this effort involved the use of state-of-the-art digital 3D imaging developed by hulet Packard and an 8ton x-ray tomography machine built by UK firm xtec systems both of which had to be transported to the National archaeological Museum in Athens since the antia mechanism is too fragile to travel but the team obtained much more than high resolution photos and x-rays while working at the Museum they were approached by a curator who had discovered a box labeled antia in a storage room the box turned out to contain 72 extra fragments of the mechanism increasing the total to 82 the largest seven of these fragments are now designated by the letters a to G the remaining Pieces by the numbers 1 to 75 the team's high resolution scans revealed more than 2,000 new text characters in the mechanism providing new Clues to its function for example a second smaller doll inside the rear Luna doll is divided into four quadrants marked with the names namia Nar ismia and Olympia all sides of ancient Greek athletic games this St thus likely used the Luna calendar to determine the appropriate opening day of these games which took place every two to four years but the function of one particular component remained frustratingly elusive a large 223 to gear behind the lower rear dial this is connected to an epicyclic set of four smaller gears of which the solid price had theorized calculated the phases of the moon however not only does this not make sense from a complexity standpoint but Tony free discovered all four gears in the set have the same number of teeth this would make the output the same as the input rendering the whole mechanism pointless however free then discovered an observation made by Michael Wright the one of the epicyclic gears features a pin that engages in a slot in another its rotation axis is also mounted at a slightly different angle meaning that the rotation transferred by one gear to another will periodically slow down or speed up upon reading this free had a eure moment for this mechanism perfectly modeled the orbit of the moon we now know that the moon's orbit is not perfectly circular but rather elliptical causing its motion across the sky to periodically speed up and slow down a phenomenon known as the anomalistic cycle not knowing about elliptical orbits however ancient Greek astronomers like a parus modeled this Behavior via epicycles but while this ancient Theory neatly explained the function of the offset epicyclic gears there was a further wrinkle the moon's orbit is constantly shifting tracing a flower petal-like path around the earth like a giant spirograph the time it takes for the moon to return to per its farthest distance from the earth is slightly longer than the time it takes to return to the same point in the sky a difference of just 0.112 57 9655 turns per year based on this free found that if the input gear had 27 teeth the rotation of the output gear was slightly too fast if by contrast it had 26 teeth the rotation was slightly too slow but if the input gear had 26 and a half teeth the output ratio was exactly 0.112 57965 five accurate to nine decimal places though a gear can't physically have 26 and A2 teeth free quickly realized that 26 and a half * 2 is 53 the exact number of teeth on the remaining gear in the set by using precise gear ratios and slightly offset gear axis the designer of the anti-ia mechanism had succeeded in mechanically modeling the elliptical orbit of the moon to a high degree of precision a staggering intellectual achievement in any era let alone the first century BCE but there was more to come for soon realized that the number 223 Arthur free had found repeated all over the mechanism corresponded to the 223 lunar month sour cycle that governs solar and lunar eclipses furthermore the lower back dial of the mechanism was covered in short letter groups nearly all of which featured the letters Sigma and adaa realizing that these stood for Seline and Helios the ancient Greek gods of the Moon and the Sun freed determined that the lower dial was in fact a sophisticated Eclipse predictor with this final breakthrough the anti theia mechanism research project was able to build a new working model of the mechanism with all components accounted except for one a small 63 to gear called R1 whose function remains a mystery to this day some believe it to be the last remaining component of Michael wri's hypothetical Planet tracking mechanism the rest of which either corroded away long ago or remains hidden somewhere beneath the agnc or waiting to be discovered others however doubt the existence of such a mechanism arguing that wri's hypothetical reconstruction is overly complicated and lacks the ingenious Elegance of the of the mechanism time will tell whether the truth will ever be discovered but the most tantalizing mystery of all Still Remains who actually built this mechanical Marvel and when unfortunately hard evidence is rather thin on the ground though there are some tantalizing Clues though the 1901 Expedition that first excavated the r dated it to the 2 Century BCE excavations conducted by Explorer jacqu custo in the 1950s and70s uncovered coins minted in the Greek city of pergamon dated to 86 BC reducing the age of the wreck by a full century and while nothing resembling the antia mechanism has yet been discovered from this period there is evidence that devices of this type were widely known in the ancient Mediterranean for example just a few years after the anti ship went down the Roman Statesman and writer Cicero wrote that his colleague the professor pois adonius of rhs recently made a globe which in its revolutions shows the movements of the sun and stars and planets by day and night just as they appear in the sky indeed the antique ship was built in the rodian style while the parega almanac has been shown to be most accurate at the attitude similar to RADS furthermore RADS was also home to hipparchus on Whose astronomical theories much of the mechanism is based others however point to An Origin in pergamon which minted the coins found aboard the Shipwreck and his library was second only to The Great Library of Alexandria in terms of preserved ancient knowledge but perhaps the most tantalizing Theory credits the mechanism's creation to an even more legendary intellect among the many findings of the antio theum mechanism research project was that the names of certain months on the calendar dll were not Universal across the helenistic world but were instead specific to the city state of Corinth and its colonies and one of the major colonies of Corinth was Syracuse on what is now the island of Sicily home to none other than mathematical and mechanical genius Archimedes indeed in his account of the 221 BC Siege in which Archimedes was killed by the Romans Cicero claims that the general in charge Marcus marcelus made off with a sophisticated astronomical in strument designed by the great genius himself but while compelling enough to inspire the writers of Indiana Jones unfortunately this origin story is almost certainly false for one thing Archimedes died more than a hundred years before the anti the ship sank while in 2017 it was determined that though the calender star used by the mechanism was indeed specific to Corinth it could not have come from Syracuse then again a 2014 study conducted by Christian Carman and James Evans at the University of Puget Sound found that the start date on the sour cycle Eclipse predictor corresponded to around 205 BCE only 7 years after Archimedes death meaning that while Archimedes may not have physically built the anti mechanism itself he may have invented many of its operating principles inspiring a centuries long tradition of mechanical computer construction without further Evidence we may never know for certain but regardless of who exactly designed it the antiy thean mechanism stands as an astonishing Monument to the genius of the Ancients an object the likes of which would not appear again until the 40 Century it also serves as a sobering reminder of just how much ancient knowledge has been tragically lost to history as Derek do Sola price once wrote the antia mechanism requires us to completely rethink our attitude toward ancient Greek technology men who could build this could have built almost anything they wanted to the technology was there and it has just not survived like the great marble buildings statutory and the constantly recopied literary works of high culture and once again thanks to fishing Clash for sponsoring this video If fishing is your thing please do check them out for free at the link below and be sure and use our promo code today I found out for $20 in free gear thanks for supporting our Channel and thanks for watching

Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 248,076

Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know, indiana jones, history, antikythera mechanism, engineering history, engineering

Id: F_ePbbujrp0

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024