Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text stuff from dot com.
Speaker 1: Kay there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: and today I wanted to do a quick update to
Speaker 1: an episode that first published November eight, two thousand thirteen.
Speaker 1: In that episode, Joe McCormick joined the show to talk
Speaker 1: about an ancient computer we anti kither One mechanism. Now,
Speaker 1: the mechanism is a really cool device, and Joe and
Speaker 1: I had a lot of fun and talking about it.
Speaker 1: But I don't want to spoil my surprise, so let's
Speaker 1: run the episode and I'll tell you the exciting news
Speaker 1: stuff at the end. I gave Joe the ability to
Speaker 1: choose whatever topic he wanted to pick, as long as
Speaker 1: it wasn't something that we had, you know, covered extensively
Speaker 1: in tech stuff in the past. So, Joe, why would
Speaker 1: you like to talk about? Well, Um, on forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: we usually talk about the future or another and um
Speaker 1: so I wanted to go in completely the opposite direction
Speaker 1: and talk about the technology of the past. And I
Speaker 1: started thinking, I wonder, what's the oldest computer that we
Speaker 1: know about? Oh, I got you. So we're talking nineteen
Speaker 1: forty six with any ac right that computer that you
Speaker 1: would end up programming with lots of plugs and switches,
Speaker 1: not at all. Wow, no, so wait are you you're
Speaker 1: saying it's older than that? Older? Okay? All right, well fine,
Speaker 1: how about the ninety two that's the Tennis Soft Berry
Speaker 1: Computer or ABC, which was built at Iowa State College
Speaker 1: which now university obviously, but it was there was a
Speaker 1: patent dispute actually, that was decided in the United States
Speaker 1: government about whether any AC or the ABC computer were first,
Speaker 1: and ultimately they said that it, uh, you could not
Speaker 1: have anyone to claim they were the ones to invent
Speaker 1: the computer. That's the first one, right, ABC computer. Okay,
Speaker 1: Light ninety one. We're starting to get a little fuzzy here,
Speaker 1: but all right. So Conrad Zeus builds the Z three
Speaker 1: computer and that was also the same year when the
Speaker 1: first BOMBA was built, you know, one of the devices
Speaker 1: meant to help decrypt German messages. That's it, right, alright.
Speaker 1: Ninety nine George Stibbitts completes the complex number calculator the
Speaker 1: C and C at Bell Telephone Laboratories. We just finished
Speaker 1: talking about Bell Labs. This has got to be it.
Speaker 1: And even in the first demonstration he used teletype so
Speaker 1: that he could program this remotely over special telephone line.
Speaker 1: So it was the first remote computer as well. So
Speaker 1: that's it, right, I think you need to think less electricity. Fine, Fine,
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty seven. The Analytical Engine. Charles Babbage. He designs this,
Speaker 1: never finishes it in his lifetime. But of course that
Speaker 1: is the device that Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of numbers,
Speaker 1: had possibly even created computer programs for algorithms where she
Speaker 1: envisioned a time where you could encode things like music
Speaker 1: and poetry into mathematics. That's it, the analytical engine. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna talk about that. No, you're you're about
Speaker 1: two years off. Say what I'm not not about almost okay,
Speaker 1: so what are you talking about? I'm talking about something
Speaker 1: that is called the antique antique antique. Oh, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have this problem the whole time. The anti Cithera me Yes,
Speaker 1: the anti Cithera mechanism or also known as the anti
Speaker 1: Kathera mechanism. Yeah, it all depends on the r which
Speaker 1: pronunciation you followed. Anti Cuithera seems to be fairly commonplace.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna go ahead and use that one and
Speaker 1: probably switch off without even thinking about it. All right,
Speaker 1: I know a little bit about this, but I guess
Speaker 1: before we talk about this mechanism, maybe we need to
Speaker 1: say what the heck is Anti Cithera. For anyone who
Speaker 1: is not familiar with the the geography of Greece, you
Speaker 1: may not know this. This refers to a place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an island in the Mediterranean Sea. And if you, um,
Speaker 1: if you imagine you're looking at the Mediterranean, it's the
Speaker 1: small island that's between Crete to the south and the
Speaker 1: Peloponnesian Peninsula up to the north, so the mainland of Greece,
Speaker 1: and it's right there in the middle. Um, there's a
Speaker 1: bigger island just called Kythera, and this is a smaller
Speaker 1: one offset from it, called Anti So if Anti Cithera
Speaker 1: and Kithera were to collide, it would just destroy one another.
Speaker 1: Total positronic revers Yeah, you tell him about the twinkie,
Speaker 1: so you know, joking aside. Does that mean that this
Speaker 1: is where that mechanism was was made? Um? No, probably not.
Speaker 1: This is where the mechanism was discovered. It got its name, gotcha.
Speaker 1: So someone was walking around Anti Cithera one day and
Speaker 1: they stubbed their toe and oh, what's this and found
Speaker 1: the world's oldest computer. No, it's much creepier. Um. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the story goes like this. Around the r nineteen hundred,
Speaker 1: there was a group of sponged divers who were off
Speaker 1: the coast of Antikithera and they were doing their diving
Speaker 1: and just whatever sponge divers do. They were gathering sponges,
Speaker 1: gathering sponges to wash all their dishes exactly. Um. So
Speaker 1: they were doing their thing. But apparently one of the
Speaker 1: divers came up to the surface and he was like, guys,
Speaker 1: there are dead women lying all over the bottom of
Speaker 1: the ocean. There's a bunch of naked dead ladies at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the ocean. Yet sounds creepy. But statos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Actually what he was seeing were statues. They were bronze
Speaker 1: and marble statues that were part of the payload of
Speaker 1: a almost well I guess about exactly to year old
Speaker 1: ship wreck of a ship that was a Roman ship,
Speaker 1: a large Roman ship carrying a lot of cargo, much
Speaker 1: of it probably stolen or looted cargo. Right, we're talking
Speaker 1: at an era just around the time when the Romans
Speaker 1: were beginning to uh let's say, incorporate the Hellenistic societies
Speaker 1: into their empire. Of course, So it had all these
Speaker 1: Greek artifacts on it, Yeah, luxury items, like really expensive
Speaker 1: stuff in the Greek world. Yeah. And so the idea is,
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly what the ship was doing. We
Speaker 1: think it was probably a ship that was returning to
Speaker 1: Rome from some destination uh in the Greek world. And
Speaker 1: so there are a lot of these Greek artifacts, including currency. Uh.
Speaker 1: They had like you said, statues, they had lots of pottery, um,
Speaker 1: and they had this this device, which was well, at first,
Speaker 1: it was just a lump, right, yeah, right, yeah first. Well,
Speaker 1: and of course it didn't get that much attention early
Speaker 1: on because there was so much other stuff down there
Speaker 1: in that shipwreck. Right, So the people who went into
Speaker 1: really investigate the shipwreck and take a look and see
Speaker 1: what was going on, they didn't necessarily realize that there
Speaker 1: was something truly special, something that was beyond just uh
Speaker 1: special from an artistic merit point of view, but could
Speaker 1: tell us a lot about how much the ancient Greeks
Speaker 1: knew about craftsmanship, about astronomy, about math, all of these
Speaker 1: things we've become apparent. But only a hundred years later,
Speaker 1: right after the explorer. So so it it's it's forgotten
Speaker 1: for two thousand years essentially, and then for another hundred
Speaker 1: years we don't really know what it is. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of this lump of corroded bronze inside what what
Speaker 1: used to be a wooden box essentially disintegrated. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: there's like there's one big remaining lump, but they're about
Speaker 1: eighty two fragments in total, right, So one of those fragments,
Speaker 1: the main fragment, has the vast majority of the what
Speaker 1: we know of as the inner workings of whatever this
Speaker 1: device was supposed to be. And we know a lot
Speaker 1: more about now, but don't want to ruin the surprise, no,
Speaker 1: But so basically we can say like what it was
Speaker 1: made of. So what they think now is, Okay, this
Speaker 1: looks like it was some kind of collection of bronze
Speaker 1: gears inside of a wooden casing. Yeah. In fact, at
Speaker 1: first they thought it might only be just one gear
Speaker 1: that somehow was loose from something else, and then they realized, no,
Speaker 1: there's actually several gears here, but it's all corroded together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's sort of like a fused into a big
Speaker 1: bottom of the ocean snotball, Yeah exactly, that's very accurate. Um.
Speaker 1: But so if you can imagine I would call like
Speaker 1: imagine a mid sized dictionary, not like a pocket dictionary,
Speaker 1: but also not that huge one from the library that
Speaker 1: you couldn't see it on a pedestal, like a like
Speaker 1: a large hardback dictionary. Um. And it's got a wooden casing,
Speaker 1: so you could open that casing up and then inside
Speaker 1: you've got this corroded mass that uh, that is all
Speaker 1: this gear formation. Now, of course the wooden casing doesn't
Speaker 1: really remain except in rotted fragmentary form. Um. But that's
Speaker 1: the basic mechanism we're dealing with. And if you start
Speaker 1: to look at it, you would see this one big
Speaker 1: gear um, but you might wonder what does this thing do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And beyond that, I mean, before we even get to that,
Speaker 1: like how old is this thing? Oh? Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: mean we we figured that the shipwreck happens sometime around
Speaker 1: eighty five b C. E before common eras because mostly
Speaker 1: because of the dates that we found and I say we,
Speaker 1: but the explorers found on the currency. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: sometimes Joe and I we get we get tired of
Speaker 1: working on stuff or four thinking we pop out to
Speaker 1: the Greek islands and then just go well skin diving. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and X, by the way does mark the
Speaker 1: spot now, but we by dating things like the currency,
Speaker 1: they have sort of narrowed the ranged around eight five
Speaker 1: b C. But that that doesn't necessarily mean that's how
Speaker 1: old the device is. No, they think that the device
Speaker 1: is older than the wreck, so it wasn't built like
Speaker 1: right before that. It's generally dated between a hundred and
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty b C. So it's thought of
Speaker 1: as a second century b c E device, Right, So
Speaker 1: so it is an ancient device. Uh, that's seems to
Speaker 1: be about how old it is. Uh, we've got some
Speaker 1: ideas of where it may have come from. There were some, No,
Speaker 1: we don't we don't have any The instruction manual for
Speaker 1: this device was not anywhere to be found. It was
Speaker 1: not on the glove compartment of this shipwreck, so we
Speaker 1: can't be absolutely certain. Uh. There's some speculation that maybe
Speaker 1: it was the island of Rhodes, which was known for
Speaker 1: its scholarship and also it's craftsmanship. But there are some
Speaker 1: other options as well that we can talk about. But
Speaker 1: beyond that. Um, we've talked about what was made of,
Speaker 1: we talked about how old it was, but yeah, what
Speaker 1: what did this thing do? And at first it was
Speaker 1: a real mystery. In fact, for like we said, like
Speaker 1: a century, it was a mystery. We just didn't have
Speaker 1: enough information to be able to determine that. We had
Speaker 1: some wild guests. There were people who made some good guesses,
Speaker 1: but they didn't know the full extent yet. Um, and
Speaker 1: that they didn't realize initially how awesome this thing was.
Speaker 1: You know, we can make an argument that this is
Speaker 1: the oldest computer, which obviously means that it has to
Speaker 1: do more than just have some inner work, inner working
Speaker 1: gears that move smoothly. It has to do something beyond that,
Speaker 1: because otherwise anything that was reliant on gears and clockwork
Speaker 1: you could call a computer. But we'll get into exactly
Speaker 1: what it is that this thing did. That kind of
Speaker 1: makes us consider it more of a computer device and
Speaker 1: analog computer than some sort of interesting clockwork. Right. So, um,
Speaker 1: but in general, what we understand it to have been
Speaker 1: able to do, and in fact, we understand a lot
Speaker 1: more about it in very recent years than we had
Speaker 1: for the century leading up to it. Oh well, I'd say,
Speaker 1: now we've basically had a slam dunk in this one.
Speaker 1: Recent recent revelations have shown us, oh, this is pretty
Speaker 1: much exactly what it is, Yeah, which is phenomenal when
Speaker 1: you think of how badly in repair this thing was.
Speaker 1: But but ultimately what it does is it's it's a
Speaker 1: device that not only tracks celestial events and the movement
Speaker 1: of celestial bodies in relation into our perspective here on Earth,
Speaker 1: it also predicts them. So in other words, you not
Speaker 1: only can you can you keep track of what's going on,
Speaker 1: and it could give you an indication of where you
Speaker 1: would need to look in the sky if you wanted
Speaker 1: to see something like Mars. It also would tell you that, oh,
Speaker 1: on this particular date, you will have a full solar eclipse.
Speaker 1: It's kind of cool, yeah, In other words, an astronomical
Speaker 1: calculatory UM. And so what it would do is you
Speaker 1: would have a position of the Earth and then UM
Speaker 1: by moving the hand crying which which no longer exists,
Speaker 1: but that's that's what figure. It was a hand crank
Speaker 1: that that provided the the kinetic energy to make everything turn.
Speaker 1: But by moving that you could see at the same
Speaker 1: time based on a projected date in the future, the
Speaker 1: positions of the Sun, of the Moon, um, probably of
Speaker 1: the planets we don't know the planet gears are missing,
Speaker 1: probably the at least the plants that the Greeks knew about,
Speaker 1: which included the probably not the planetists, probably not the
Speaker 1: we don't think well, not Neptune Uranus or or if
Speaker 1: you want to be kind, Pluto um. They they had
Speaker 1: identified as far out as Saturn. Now, if in fact
Speaker 1: we were to find evidence that it included these other
Speaker 1: planets as well, that as far as we know, they
Speaker 1: didn't know about, then that would make the third part
Speaker 1: of our conversation they get a little more interesting. It
Speaker 1: also had yeah, as you said, an eclipse prediction dial
Speaker 1: uh and that's really cool. Uh. And it also predicted
Speaker 1: cultural events, So that's true, like the Olympiad, right, because
Speaker 1: you had a schedule of when that would take place,
Speaker 1: and so by plotting it against this device and actually
Speaker 1: inscribing it on the device, you could in a factor
Speaker 1: then you could see what the what the celestial events
Speaker 1: were going to be at a planned future event that way,
Speaker 1: which is kind of handy. Um. But we'll talk specifically.
Speaker 1: We need to really get into the nitty gritty of
Speaker 1: how this is possible, and then we'll conclude at the
Speaker 1: end talking about how we know all of this stuff, because,
Speaker 1: as you're gonna learn, it's really complicated to figure out
Speaker 1: how a device works if you can't actually visualize all
Speaker 1: the gears when you first get hold of it. Before
Speaker 1: we get into that conversation, let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Alright, we're back, so let's talk
Speaker 1: about how this device actually tracked celestial events, because we
Speaker 1: we know they are all these gears. There's a hand
Speaker 1: cranky turn. It moves things forwards that you can look
Speaker 1: at what the celestial conditions are on any given date,
Speaker 1: or you can even advance it so that you can
Speaker 1: look for a specific celestial event. Let's say you're looking
Speaker 1: specifically for when is the next eclipse going to occur,
Speaker 1: So you're not looking to see what the celestial scott
Speaker 1: what the sky is going to look like, um, three
Speaker 1: months from now, you just want to know when the
Speaker 1: next eclipse is. You could advance the handle from your
Speaker 1: date and keep doing it until you saw the eclipse
Speaker 1: information come up, and then compare that see what the
Speaker 1: date is on the other part of the indicator. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about all the different dials. This should be indicated
Speaker 1: by a dial, so it's like a it's like an
Speaker 1: analog clock face. You would be spinning around a point
Speaker 1: to let you know when this is coming exactly. And
Speaker 1: then you could say, oh, all right, so the next
Speaker 1: eclipse is in you know, you know, three months and
Speaker 1: two weeks from now or whatever. And uh so there's
Speaker 1: a lot of different ways you could use this. Well, um,
Speaker 1: there were about thirty thirty one gears that we know of,
Speaker 1: probably the least at least more or at least thirty,
Speaker 1: probably more. So it's I think hypothesized that there were
Speaker 1: more to deal with the movement of the planets that
Speaker 1: that's just lost. And you know, it's not a surprise
Speaker 1: because again, like I said, when we call it bad repair,
Speaker 1: I mean you're you think about this. This is like
Speaker 1: essentially the imagine a clock that's been fused into one piece.
Speaker 1: I mean, an old style gear clock fused into one piece.
Speaker 1: That's kind of and it's it's opaque, so you can't
Speaker 1: see these gears that are on the inside just with
Speaker 1: the naked eye. But we'll get into how we figured
Speaker 1: more about this in a little bit. But so you
Speaker 1: had all these different dials that would mark different events,
Speaker 1: uh and different time spans. Right, So you would have
Speaker 1: a dial that would be set up for, uh, for
Speaker 1: just regular keeping of of a calendar year. But there
Speaker 1: were also dials that were more attuned to specific celestial cycles.
Speaker 1: So for example, there might be a nineteen year cycle
Speaker 1: that's represented by one dial, another one had i I
Speaker 1: think a seventy five year dial. And these dials were
Speaker 1: to refer to things that patterns that would repeat once
Speaker 1: you hit those time frames, so like every nineteen years,
Speaker 1: this one set of pattern would repeat itself. So that's
Speaker 1: why they have these different dials to indicate exactly what's
Speaker 1: happening at exactly what time. Uh. What I loved was
Speaker 1: the idea that there was one gear specifically devoted to
Speaker 1: showing the phase of the moon. So not only would
Speaker 1: you see the position of the moon on any given date,
Speaker 1: but you would also see what phase it was in,
Speaker 1: whether it was waxing or waning, a new moon, full moon, whatever,
Speaker 1: and and uh, I really thought that was very clever.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you essentially either either refer to the dates
Speaker 1: and look at the celestial events to compare the two,
Speaker 1: or you had said it, so that you would look
Speaker 1: at a specific configuration of the celestial body and then
Speaker 1: look at what date corresponded to it. It's um kind
Speaker 1: of amazing to imagine the complex planning and craftsmanship that
Speaker 1: went into a machine like this, because, um, when you
Speaker 1: start thinking about it, Okay, say somebody set you down
Speaker 1: and told you to try to build something like this,
Speaker 1: and you had you know, it was open book test.
Speaker 1: You knew what time frame all these celestial events would
Speaker 1: occur in. How would you do it? Yeah, I mean God,
Speaker 1: so you would have kind of figure out the relationships
Speaker 1: between the sizes of gears um and the way they
Speaker 1: would lock to create fractional relationships between the movements of
Speaker 1: all the different bodies at the same time. And keep
Speaker 1: in mind that if this thing is reflecting say planets
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, well, from a geocentric point of view,
Speaker 1: the movement of the planets is not just a simple circle.
Speaker 1: I mean you see them, they persiss and then they
Speaker 1: go backwards and all of these things exactly. So if
Speaker 1: you and there's a fellow named Michael T. Wright who
Speaker 1: built a replica of this device, and we'll talk more
Speaker 1: about him probably in a bit, but he there's a
Speaker 1: great video that demonstrates him using this machine to show
Speaker 1: the movement of these different elements, and sometimes you see
Speaker 1: them moving kind of backward compared to other elements, and
Speaker 1: you think, wow, the gears have to account for that too.
Speaker 1: The gears have to be able to do very complex
Speaker 1: movements of these uh, these these arms that are on
Speaker 1: these dials in order to reflect what is really happening.
Speaker 1: And while the model itself uh does depict a geocentric
Speaker 1: view of celestial bodies, we can't be sure that the
Speaker 1: person who built it necessarily ascribed necessararily ascribed to a
Speaker 1: geocentric philosophy. Oh, that's certainly true, because for the device's function,
Speaker 1: I mean it was, it was functionally geocentric, right, because
Speaker 1: we're from exactly. Even if the person who made it
Speaker 1: actually thought the Earth went around the Sun, it would
Speaker 1: still look the same pretty much, because if you're reflecting
Speaker 1: how the world, how the how the celestial you know,
Speaker 1: elements look compared to being on the Earth, it makes
Speaker 1: no sense to make it anything other than geocentric. So
Speaker 1: the heliocentric theories had been placed ahead of when we
Speaker 1: think this device was made. So it's possible we don't know,
Speaker 1: because there were still people who who's ascribed to a
Speaker 1: geocentric worldview. I'd probably that was dominant, Yeah, because because
Speaker 1: it was similar to what we would see centries later,
Speaker 1: where to propose such a thing as a helos heliocentric
Speaker 1: view would mean that you might suffer a little bit
Speaker 1: of let's say, you might get ostracized with extreme prejudice.
Speaker 1: People didn't like here in that. Yeah. So anyway, you know,
Speaker 1: it does look like it was going to show you
Speaker 1: not only the Sun and Moon's movements, which is already
Speaker 1: complex enough because they don't move at the same you
Speaker 1: know rate, or you know, they change positions, uh differently
Speaker 1: relative to one another. Then to throw in the other
Speaker 1: planets makes that or the plants that the Greeks knew about,
Speaker 1: makes it even more complex. So here's the question, does
Speaker 1: this count as a computer? I would say absolutely. I
Speaker 1: would say so too, And I've got a little argument here.
Speaker 1: Tell me what you think of so um, I'd say
Speaker 1: the basic definition of a computer. A lot of times
Speaker 1: it's included that it's electronic. But let's take that part
Speaker 1: out and say, well, whether or not it's electronic. UM,
Speaker 1: A computers like an interactive machine that and and these
Speaker 1: words often come up, store, retrieve, and process data. That's fair. Um,
Speaker 1: so it's like input, output and processing and storage. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I always think of it as something that can can
Speaker 1: take input, put it through some form of algorithm, meaning
Speaker 1: a set of rules, and then give you output on
Speaker 1: the other side. And it's predictable. It's going to do
Speaker 1: that the same way. Like, assuming that you put in
Speaker 1: the same input and you're running it through the same algorithm,
Speaker 1: you're always going to get the same output. Okay, so
Speaker 1: both definitions work very well together. Yeah, I'd say the
Speaker 1: biggest distinction is that today's computers we think of as
Speaker 1: being general use. So you you have hardware that can compute,
Speaker 1: but you've also got software to boss the hardware around,
Speaker 1: so it can tell it to compute in different ways. Right.
Speaker 1: So in that way, you can have a single machine
Speaker 1: allow you to do Excel spreadsheets or play you know,
Speaker 1: the first person shooter game. Right. But obviously without electronics,
Speaker 1: this this ancient computer doesn't have software. It just has hardware.
Speaker 1: Or it's like thinking about a computer that can only
Speaker 1: run one program, which is not that difficult to imagine.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you if you think of calculators as
Speaker 1: a subset of computers. Calculators like your basic calculator. I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about your super crazy calculators that have apps
Speaker 1: on them and everything, but your basic calculator does basic
Speaker 1: calculator functions. It's, you know, again, taking that input, putting
Speaker 1: it through an algorithm, some sort of mathematical process, and
Speaker 1: you get an output similar to this device. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: this device, it's like a computer that only has one job.
Speaker 1: But within that job, I think it's definitely worth saying
Speaker 1: it's a computer because its stores data. So the relationships
Speaker 1: between the astronomical pathways are represented by the mechanical math
Speaker 1: that's done between the teeth and the gears. So like
Speaker 1: the gear sizes themselves, they're sort of storing that data.
Speaker 1: Sure um. And then it takes input. You turn the
Speaker 1: hand crank to give it the input of the date
Speaker 1: you want to calculate, and then it gives you output.
Speaker 1: It's got the dials that reflect the computed values of
Speaker 1: the of what you're looking for. And even as I
Speaker 1: have said before, you could do it the other way
Speaker 1: where you keep turning the dial until you get the
Speaker 1: configuration you were interested in, and then you look at
Speaker 1: the date right, so it works in either sense, and uh,
Speaker 1: pretty phenomenal. I mean, it's when you think about how
Speaker 1: precise you have to be to make sure you get this,
Speaker 1: and not only that, but just the huge amount of
Speaker 1: information you have to have at your disposal to even
Speaker 1: start in the craftsmanship of this thing. Because the Greeks
Speaker 1: had a lot of of information about astronomy, some of
Speaker 1: it they got from the Babylonians, So the Babylonians were
Speaker 1: known as very much interested in astronomy. The Greeks were
Speaker 1: as well, and so they had to have had all
Speaker 1: this observation data that they had, the things that they
Speaker 1: had observed about the movement of celestial objects in the
Speaker 1: sky and how those patterns would arise in order for
Speaker 1: them to plan that out into a mechanical device. And
Speaker 1: that to me is really amazing because you're not talking about, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, every four weeks, this one event happens. Now,
Speaker 1: some of these cycles, like I said, are incredibly long.
Speaker 1: You had a nineteen year cycle, you had a seventy
Speaker 1: six year cycle, you had a fifty four year cycle.
Speaker 1: All of these were taken into account to explain the
Speaker 1: movement of celestial objects in various ways, whether it's a
Speaker 1: solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse, or that you get
Speaker 1: both a lunar and a solar eclipse within a certain
Speaker 1: amount of time, not to mention the movement of the
Speaker 1: other planets. That's a lot of information that you have
Speaker 1: to have compiled before you ever cut into a sheet
Speaker 1: of bronze. Uh. Yes, it certainly is. And and even
Speaker 1: harder is imagining how you would begin to compute that data. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean nobody. Um, well, actually this is a good question, Um,
Speaker 1: had anybody ever made anything like this before? Obviously we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure, right, Well, we don't have evidence
Speaker 1: this is the earliest existing device. In fact, we don't
Speaker 1: have any other devices to point to. Uh. And let's
Speaker 1: be clear when we're calling it the earliest known computer
Speaker 1: that that doesn't mean we think that there's nothing that
Speaker 1: like this that could have come before. It just means
Speaker 1: the it's the earliest one that we have, so and
Speaker 1: we don't have any others. It's not like there are
Speaker 1: you know, twenty other examples of this. In fact, if
Speaker 1: you want to look at for another object that's as
Speaker 1: complex as this one, you have to go about fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred years further into the early Renaissance and look at
Speaker 1: the Middle East, China, and Europe for devices that start
Speaker 1: to equal this level of complexity. However, these historians of
Speaker 1: mechanical engineering, they say, this kind of stuff doesn't show
Speaker 1: up until late medieval clockwork. It's like, yeah, at the earliest. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when you take that into account, you think, well,
Speaker 1: you know, is this is this an anomaly? Is it
Speaker 1: a one offite some mad genius come up with us?
Speaker 1: But if you if you were to actually carefully examine
Speaker 1: those gears, and we'll talk more about how people have
Speaker 1: done that over the last decade or so, if you
Speaker 1: were to very carefully examine them, you would see that
Speaker 1: they appear to have been made flawlessly, like there were
Speaker 1: no mistakes. Uh. You know, a lot of experts have
Speaker 1: said that if you were to build, say a clock,
Speaker 1: and it's your first clock, it may be a functional clock,
Speaker 1: but if you were to look at the clockwork, you
Speaker 1: might see where there were mistakes that were made and
Speaker 1: then corrected for later on. There No, there's no evidence
Speaker 1: of that in this device, which suggests that whoever built
Speaker 1: it had done it at least a few times before
Speaker 1: to perfect the whole process before building another one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and combined with the fact that this thing is just
Speaker 1: so smart, that suggests it was probably not the only
Speaker 1: one of its kind. It probably came from a line
Speaker 1: of similar devices, maybe of advancing complexity. And you might think, well,
Speaker 1: if this is the case, where the heck is everything
Speaker 1: else and well, some of it could just be lost
Speaker 1: or destroyed. And also being made out of bronze means
Speaker 1: that it's a valuable resource which occasionally for other purposes,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, war, you would melt down so
Speaker 1: that you could use it for other stuff. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean think we're talking about the first and second century
Speaker 1: b C. In the Hellenistic world. I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: a time when stuff might have gotten grabbed and taken
Speaker 1: to another place, melted down, or just lost, just like
Speaker 1: just like this one was lost. There's stuff going on
Speaker 1: if you look at uh, and we should mention this
Speaker 1: stuff you missed in History Class Sister podcast they did
Speaker 1: an episode on this same topic. Fantastic episode, highly recommended,
Speaker 1: You should definitely go listen to it. Um. But one
Speaker 1: of the things they pointed out was that if you
Speaker 1: look at bronze statues from that era, they're very very
Speaker 1: few of them, and I think like nine out of
Speaker 1: ten came from shipwrecks because the ones that were left
Speaker 1: on land, more frequently than not had been melted down
Speaker 1: for other purposes. So it's it's one of those There
Speaker 1: was not necessarily a sense of permanency in the time
Speaker 1: of the world. Okay, so we don't have, like, in
Speaker 1: terms of archaeology, another device like this from the time.
Speaker 1: Has anybody ever described a device like this from the time? Uh,
Speaker 1: that's a good question. Do you have any actual information
Speaker 1: on that? Because when I was looking forward, I was
Speaker 1: it seemed to me at the time that everyone was
Speaker 1: absolutely shocked by this device because it didn't seem to
Speaker 1: have any kind of shock, shocked to the point where
Speaker 1: they were wondering if it was perhaps a hoax, that
Speaker 1: maybe someone had planted this thing and it was a fake.
Speaker 1: But but it may be that there are sources I'm
Speaker 1: I'm aware of. Do you know any I think there
Speaker 1: are ancient descriptions of ore ries. Okay, so those are
Speaker 1: wouldn't be exactly like this, but sort of ancient models
Speaker 1: of the movement of the Planet's interesting, so it Yeah,
Speaker 1: and of course we do know that there were philosophers
Speaker 1: who had described uh, the very motions that this device
Speaker 1: enacted that you know they were they were just describing
Speaker 1: it for scholarly purposes, and this device would show that
Speaker 1: in action if you were to move the handle. Well,
Speaker 1: here's an interesting question. Who built this thing? Yeah? Where
Speaker 1: did it come from? We don't. We don't know, is
Speaker 1: the short answer. We have some suspicions. Uh. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: name Archimedes gets thrown around there. Yeah, so one clue
Speaker 1: is just that Archimedes he was around, you know, a
Speaker 1: century before this, and he was a genius inventor and
Speaker 1: uh or at least we assume, so some of his
Speaker 1: inventions we cannot actually be certain were ever built. But sure,
Speaker 1: come on, he built a death ray, just just death ray, okay,
Speaker 1: probably and a giant mare, a giant arm that would
Speaker 1: upset besieging ships. I want to believe, I understand. Okay,
Speaker 1: So well, is that the only evidence that it might
Speaker 1: have been our comedies? Well, no, Archimedes, as you might remember,
Speaker 1: was from Uh he lived in Syracuse in the which
Speaker 1: is unfortunate. Yeah, well, unfortunate for our comedies. Uh, he
Speaker 1: lived in Syracuse. And an interesting fact about the device
Speaker 1: that we discovered later is that okay, So the device
Speaker 1: has inscriptions all over it, very faint inscriptions, and they're
Speaker 1: hard to read because of all the corrosion from the
Speaker 1: thousands of years. But what they discovered was, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: actually we can make out some of these with some
Speaker 1: of this imaging we're about to talk about in the
Speaker 1: next section. And it's in coin A Greek. So that
Speaker 1: was sort of like coin A Greek was the lingua
Speaker 1: franca of the Hellenistic world, you know, people spoke it
Speaker 1: all over the place. But the calendar that was represented
Speaker 1: on here reflected the kind of calendar that would be
Speaker 1: used in the Ionian area, which would include Syracuse. So
Speaker 1: that that gives at least some against our substantial evidence
Speaker 1: that perhaps our comedies could have been involved in this.
Speaker 1: Then again, our comedies probably died too early to have
Speaker 1: made this particular device due to an over zealous soldier.
Speaker 1: We know he died in I think to twelve BC,
Speaker 1: and the device was made in the probably sometimes between
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty, So yeah, that does put some he
Speaker 1: died too early to have personally made it, right, maybe
Speaker 1: he made an earlier one. Yeah, And that's one idea,
Speaker 1: is that it could have come out of a sort
Speaker 1: of a Syracuse based school of our comedies maybe. And again,
Speaker 1: the Island of Rhodes is another example that people have
Speaker 1: have presented saying that they were very much on that island,
Speaker 1: there was a scholarly center that was devoted to astronomy,
Speaker 1: and that they also had craftsmen who worked in clockwork
Speaker 1: type devices. So it's possible that it could have originated
Speaker 1: from that area. We just we don't know. There's some
Speaker 1: clues there, but we don't know for sure. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: name I just want to mention real quick that gets
Speaker 1: brought up is Hipparcos. Hipparcos Hippocaus of of Nicia, and
Speaker 1: he was a Greek astronomer um and geographer and he
Speaker 1: did the maths. He was a smart guy trigonometry, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: he he was also uh, he wasn't Hippocrates, but anyway,
Speaker 1: he he He also was known for describing the movements
Speaker 1: of the sun in the moon, right and uh. In
Speaker 1: some indications that it maybe could have had something to
Speaker 1: do with him, or that the astronomical theories that are
Speaker 1: reflected in this, including like the movement of the moon,
Speaker 1: reflects his thoughts about the movement. So it may not
Speaker 1: be that he had a direct hand in it, but
Speaker 1: that perhaps a student or someone familiar with his work
Speaker 1: took the theory and put it into a physical object. Okay,
Speaker 1: but I have another theory about who created it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a feeling. I know what you're gonna say.
Speaker 1: But hit me with it, buddy. Okay, Well, it goes
Speaker 1: like this, This mechanism is way too advanced to have
Speaker 1: been built by human beings at the time. Obviously it
Speaker 1: was built by a aliens be time traveler see transdimensional reptilians. Right,
Speaker 1: so um or or sorry d um, like a super
Speaker 1: advanced secret human society that we don't know about, like Atlantis,
Speaker 1: But we do know about them, and we don't think
Speaker 1: they exist. All right. So all right, And Joe, I
Speaker 1: know you're you're presenting this as a tongue in cheek
Speaker 1: because you and I share a common opinion on this
Speaker 1: about how it's absolutely ridiculous to get this nonsense to
Speaker 1: assume this. Yeah, for one thing, it it really it
Speaker 1: really says a lot about the cynicism of people when
Speaker 1: it comes to the creativity of human beings and ingenuity
Speaker 1: and our ability to process complex thought and bring them
Speaker 1: into reality, you know. I mean it's the same argument
Speaker 1: that no, the Pyramids, no human could have built those.
Speaker 1: Actually thousands of humans built those. Tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: humans built those. Yeah, it's um, it's not like somebody
Speaker 1: in ancient Greece building a warp drive, right, it's it's
Speaker 1: somebody who was building something that was totally available to
Speaker 1: someone with the technology of the time. All they had
Speaker 1: to be was really really smart, right. Yeah, we know
Speaker 1: that the astronomical knowledge was there. You know, the scholarship
Speaker 1: was there. We know that the bronze working was there.
Speaker 1: We know that people there were craftsmen hild Generally it
Speaker 1: wasn't as good as this, right, but there were craftsmen
Speaker 1: who could create incredible works out of bronze U. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of those even't survived because of again the
Speaker 1: fact that people would melt stuff down. But the ones
Speaker 1: that have survived have shown that there's you know, there
Speaker 1: has there was a level of artistry there. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: I think the bottom line is it's quite exceptional for
Speaker 1: its time, but it's not unthinkable. And so we are
Speaker 1: discounting the h the alien slash time travel or slash reptilian.
Speaker 1: So whatever. I mean, if it was from aliens, you'd
Speaker 1: think that, you know, it would reflect a little more
Speaker 1: complete astronomical knowledge. You might be electronic or something. Also,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be geocentric. Really talked about it, you know,
Speaker 1: it's functionally geocentric, even though the person who made it
Speaker 1: might have been right. But why would an alien bother
Speaker 1: to make something from Earth's perspective? Oh? Yeah, they could
Speaker 1: make an oory from the outside right, including the Earth
Speaker 1: revolving around the Sun. Yeah, why would they do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me, not
Speaker 1: knowing about planets past Saturn, and maybe they just thought
Speaker 1: those were those were not really high up on the
Speaker 1: list of the Yeah, you don't wanna you don't want
Speaker 1: to visit those? Yeah. So I think we can discount
Speaker 1: the whole alien hypothesis. So we've got more we want
Speaker 1: to talk about exactly we want to we want to
Speaker 1: cover how it is that we actually know this stuff.
Speaker 1: But before we get into at let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break and thank our sponsor. So, like I said earlier,
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Speaker 1: we have discussed what it was, we discussed how it worked.
Speaker 1: How do we know that it did this thing? I mean,
Speaker 1: you know you're talking about a giant hunk of corroded bronze.
Speaker 1: How could you possibly ever figure out what this thing
Speaker 1: actually did. As we already mentioned, people originally did not know.
Speaker 1: They had no idea what this hunk was capable of.
Speaker 1: For a century, we really didn't know. We had some
Speaker 1: people make some guesses occasionally, but for the most part,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until we were able to use something far
Speaker 1: more sophisticated than just our own eyeballs to look at it.
Speaker 1: We had to use X rays, and with the X rays, initially,
Speaker 1: the X rays show that there were lots of gears
Speaker 1: inside this hunk of corroded bronze, and that they were
Speaker 1: connected in some way. But those early X rays were
Speaker 1: not perfect. Mostly they due to the fact that you
Speaker 1: couldn't tell depth with it, so you couldn't see how
Speaker 1: the gears were connected. It was like a massive gears,
Speaker 1: but you weren't sure where where they were in relation
Speaker 1: to one another. Um it enter something called three D
Speaker 1: X ray. Yeah where you sphy? Yeah, you started ye
Speaker 1: scanning it from all different angles using different approaches. Did
Speaker 1: you did you come across the powerful X ray machines
Speaker 1: called blade Runner. I didn't. Yeah, yeah, so blade Runner
Speaker 1: X ray machines. Sorry, they used lots of different X
Speaker 1: ray machines. Throughout the study of this device, as we
Speaker 1: began to learn that this was far more important from
Speaker 1: a historical perspective than anyone had had thought leading up
Speaker 1: to this. I mean, everyone was thinking that these other
Speaker 1: artifacts were really important and this other thing was a curiosity.
Speaker 1: But as we learned more about it, we realized, whoa,
Speaker 1: this thing is amazing. Uh. Well, the the various X
Speaker 1: ray devices we used showed more of the relation of
Speaker 1: all these different gears, so we got to see how
Speaker 1: they were laid out inside this hunk of corroded bronze.
Speaker 1: But the Blade Runner device, all right, So it was
Speaker 1: an X ray machine that was designed to look for
Speaker 1: tiny cracks in turbine blades. That's what the original design
Speaker 1: of these machines was for, and to tell whether or
Speaker 1: not you're a replicant. Also to tell yeah, it would
Speaker 1: ask you, if a turtle is on its back, what
Speaker 1: do you do? Why doesn't the mechanism turn the turtle over? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So anyway, it would look for these tiny It was
Speaker 1: designed so that you could detect the tiniest of cracks
Speaker 1: and turbine blades, so that you could do maintenance before
Speaker 1: a catastrophic failure. They used it to look at this device,
Speaker 1: the anti antikythera device. We keep avoiding saying it so
Speaker 1: that I don't fall over myself. Let's say it three
Speaker 1: times together, Jonathan, that's fantastic, all right, Now you have
Speaker 1: to say it backwards. No, um. So the antikythera device,
Speaker 1: the blade Runner thing, it looks at it, and it
Speaker 1: actually is able to see because it has such precise measurements.
Speaker 1: It's able to to to distinguish what the tiny shallow
Speaker 1: carvings are on those dials. That's how we were able
Speaker 1: to read the words the inscriptions, yeah, because some of
Speaker 1: them were just very faded already, even before you talk
Speaker 1: about the corrosion effort in there or element in there,
Speaker 1: I should say. And the blade Runner X rays were
Speaker 1: able to measure these very tiny changes in the surface
Speaker 1: of these different dials, and that's how we were able
Speaker 1: to see what the writing was and thus able to
Speaker 1: really um translated and figure out what this thing actually did.
Speaker 1: And that's how people once they started reading it, once
Speaker 1: they started being able to read the writing, it became
Speaker 1: clear that this was a far more sophisticated device than
Speaker 1: what what predecessors were thinking. Even the earliest guesses were
Speaker 1: things that but probably can predict solar and lunar movements,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's some form of calendar, but it No
Speaker 1: one was really aware of how sophisticated was until we
Speaker 1: were able to take this closer look. And I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty phenomenal what we've learned about it so far.
Speaker 1: Like those shallow engravings have told us pretty much everything
Speaker 1: we need to know about its basic function, and that's
Speaker 1: how we're able to draw some conclusions, including the conclusions
Speaker 1: that lad Michael t right to build his replica of
Speaker 1: the device to the point where he's got a working replica. Uh. It,
Speaker 1: as far as we can tell, it's as accurate to
Speaker 1: the original as we can possibly get. Yeah, you should
Speaker 1: look this up on YouTube and see it, because it's
Speaker 1: not just a model, it is a working replica. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he built the machine. He used very similar methods as
Speaker 1: to what the ancient Greeks would have. He used the
Speaker 1: same sort of dimension of gears. Uh. You know, keeping
Speaker 1: in mind that we don't he's working from an incomplete model.
Speaker 1: Even with our very very sophisticated techniques these days, you
Speaker 1: can't see what's not there, right, there's still some missing
Speaker 1: pieces that we don't really have. You know, he was
Speaker 1: able to recreate it based upon what we think the
Speaker 1: device was meant to do, and his works and the
Speaker 1: videos are amazing. When you watch the just the minute
Speaker 1: movements of each of these pieces in relation to one
Speaker 1: another and think of how complex this is, it's mind blowing.
Speaker 1: It's well, and it's also it's a it's a gorgeous device,
Speaker 1: you know. It's just it's a beautiful device. You would
Speaker 1: look at and you might think Originally, if you were
Speaker 1: just a glance at it, you might think it was
Speaker 1: either a really weird clock or maybe some sort of
Speaker 1: navigational equipment for like a ship or something, just because
Speaker 1: you've got bronze and wood there. But um, yeah, once
Speaker 1: you've get a deeper understanding of what it is, it's
Speaker 1: pretty pretty nifty. I think the replica was made with
Speaker 1: brass instead of I think you're right. I think it
Speaker 1: was brass instead of bronze. So yeah, even more ship
Speaker 1: like then with the brass and would combination. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's recent scholarship going on with the project called the
Speaker 1: Anti Kit through a Mechanism research project that's a collaborative
Speaker 1: project between lots of different research organizations and individuals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a mathematio shi named Tony Free and uh he's
Speaker 1: been using imaging technology to get to the bottom of
Speaker 1: questions that remain about the mechanism. Yeah. They the group,
Speaker 1: the research group was founded in two thousand five and
Speaker 1: has been extremely active. They have sponsored several museum exhibitions
Speaker 1: throughout the world. I think right now as the recording
Speaker 1: of this podcast, at least some of the device is
Speaker 1: on display in uh in a museum in Athens, but
Speaker 1: I believe that ends in January. Yeah, it's the it's
Speaker 1: an exhibition called the Antikittheras Shipwreck, the ship the Treasures
Speaker 1: and the mechanism, and it's at the National Archaeological Museum
Speaker 1: in Athens, Greece. YEA. And so that of course has
Speaker 1: more than than the device itself. It also has examples
Speaker 1: of the other stuff that was found in that shipwreck, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, people have gone back to that shipwreck
Speaker 1: and found more things around it since that initial nine discovery. UM,
Speaker 1: and so there's there. There's also been a lot of
Speaker 1: symposia that they've held. Uh, they've had a lot of
Speaker 1: gatherings where they they combine research and they published that research.
Speaker 1: There's lots of information on their website about the device
Speaker 1: and the circumstances around its discovery and just the process
Speaker 1: of discovery as we used more and more sophisticated techniques
Speaker 1: to examine it. And it's really a great resource. I
Speaker 1: highly recommend visiting that website. I'll link to that on
Speaker 1: our Facebook page and Twitter handle so you guys can
Speaker 1: see it, because it's pretty neat stuff. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: um you know. I I really enjoyed reading about the
Speaker 1: process they went through as they would learn more and more,
Speaker 1: and of course that hasn't finished. In fact, there's there's
Speaker 1: one thing, one question besides who built it that we
Speaker 1: don't know the answer to yet, which is why did
Speaker 1: they build it? And why is it? Was it? What?
Speaker 1: What was the in purpose? Was it a scholarly tool?
Speaker 1: Was it so that they could uh create, you know,
Speaker 1: specifically plan out events to coincide with celestial events, so
Speaker 1: that perhaps it was a political tool, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: if if an eclipse is seen as a bad omen,
Speaker 1: you may want to avoid planning some big event around
Speaker 1: an eclipse just so that people don't think that the
Speaker 1: event itself is cursed. I mean, it's it's I'm sure
Speaker 1: in the ancient world you could probably get some amount
Speaker 1: of power just by being able to accurately predict eclipses. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's another possibility. It could just be religious power
Speaker 1: or political power. We don't know, And it's possible that
Speaker 1: as much as we can learn about this device, maybe
Speaker 1: we never really figure out with any degree of certainty
Speaker 1: who built it or why it was built. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'd be amazed if we ever are able to figure
Speaker 1: out who built it. That would be phenomenal to me.
Speaker 1: Unless someone's like, oh, look here there's an inscription on
Speaker 1: the bottom Johan from Sweden. What that would be a
Speaker 1: big upset, But not that I think that would ever happen.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was. I want to float another possibility steampunks, right,
Speaker 1: steampunk cost players. But I'm thinking that it was a
Speaker 1: steampunk convention, a certain doctor showed up at it, accidentally
Speaker 1: ended up grabbing this device, and on a further adventure,
Speaker 1: maybe three episodes down the line, ended up accidentally dunking
Speaker 1: it into the ocean off the coast degrease. That's exactly
Speaker 1: what happened. Um explains everything. Uh, did you see the
Speaker 1: the lego? Really cool? Now, this wasn't. We probably might
Speaker 1: not want to call it a replica because it's not
Speaker 1: trying to copy the form of the original, just the function, right,
Speaker 1: And even the function it was I think a limited
Speaker 1: part of it because it was really showing things like
Speaker 1: eclipses in the UH in the lego version, I don't
Speaker 1: think it necessarily showed all the movements that the Antikithera
Speaker 1: device showed, because I was when I watched the video,
Speaker 1: it was like, this is really clever because it would
Speaker 1: show you the the date and UH when the next
Speaker 1: eclipse would occur, whether it was solar or Luna or both.
Speaker 1: But it didn't um both as in like a region
Speaker 1: of time when both would occur, not both occurring at
Speaker 1: the same time, UM necessarily, But the the it didn't
Speaker 1: tell you things. It didn't tell you things like the
Speaker 1: movement of the planets as far as I could tell.
Speaker 1: So it was it had a limited set of functions
Speaker 1: that the Antikillera device actually did. But it was still
Speaker 1: really cool to watch. It was really cool. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you, I'm going to invent a device and it's
Speaker 1: gonna tell you it will predict when the Sun passes
Speaker 1: in front of the Moon that will be a bad day.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make sure I stay indoors that day. What
Speaker 1: is that called that's called I think that's I think
Speaker 1: that's called Well, it doesn't really matter because we're not
Speaker 1: It's essentially called boy. It sure as vaporized outside today,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Oh? Yeah, no, that would not not go
Speaker 1: over well. Now. When we recorded this episode, the belief
Speaker 1: was that the device dates from around one fifty one
Speaker 1: c E. The researchers now believe that it's actually even older,
Speaker 1: dating from two oh five b c E. Now, the
Speaker 1: researchers came to this conclusion once they determined that the
Speaker 1: Antikithera mechanism was time to begin with events starting in
Speaker 1: two oh five b c E, and not just the year.
Speaker 1: They figured out that the whole device worked best if
Speaker 1: we use May twelve, two oh five b c E
Speaker 1: as the starting date. That's the first full moon of May,
Speaker 1: by the way. Now, the researchers Christianne C. Carmen and
Speaker 1: James Evans used a system that looked at different possible
Speaker 1: starting dates, and they eliminated the ones that didn't seem
Speaker 1: to fit the mechanisms operation. The date of May twelve,
Speaker 1: two oh five b c E was the one that
Speaker 1: was left up. So why is this new information so cool? Well,
Speaker 1: for one thing, it tells us that the person who
Speaker 1: designed the mechanism wasn't relying on Greek trigonometry, which didn't
Speaker 1: exist in two O five b C. Instead, this brilliant
Speaker 1: inventor was using Babylonian arithmetic to determine the dates of
Speaker 1: various celestial events. Now it also puts the device's creation
Speaker 1: closer to the time of our comedes, who remember, died
Speaker 1: into twelve BC E. Now I felt all this information
Speaker 1: was really interesting and merited a revisit to our endokithera device.
Speaker 1: I hope you did too. Remember if you have suggestions
Speaker 1: for future episodes of tech Stuff, brite me at tech
Speaker 1: stuff at how stuff works dot com, or get in
Speaker 1: touch on social with Twitter, Facebook or Tumbler or handle
Speaker 1: at all three is tech Stuff hs W and we'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon for more on this
Speaker 1: and basons of other topics. Because it have staff works
Speaker 1: dot Com