Imaginary Gadgets 00001: The Antikythera Device
WHO: Hellenistic philosophers of the Eastern Mediterranean. Might be the Rhodes Academy headed by the Stoic philosopher, diplomat and statesman Poseidonius.
WHAT: It's a bronze, crank-driven, geared orrery in a portable wooden box.
WHEN: At or near 85 BC.
WHERE: Found in 1900 in a Roman shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. Built by Greeks, and may be from the Greek island of Rhodes.
HOW: A crank or knob drives at least 32 triangular toothed bronze wheels, causing three dials and numerous pointers to show the past and future positions of the moon, sun, and possibly the five visible planets. Displays the time of eclipses and of the Greek Olympic games.
WHY: Besides its practical uses, this gadget would appear to be a method to make Greek astrophysics visible to laymen.
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
The Antikythera Device is not an imaginary gadget. A digital scanning of its rusted interior in 2006 makes its real-world function clear (especially since it has hand-etched instructions). However, the device was salvaged in 1900, and was unbelievable. It has taken over a century for moderns to grasp that it was a true, functional orrery. It performs mechanical functions long considered unthinkable for that period.
What was on the minds of the owners and/or builders?
They certainly did not call this (as we do) a "device," a "machine", a "clockwork" or a "computer." Nor was it a "scientific instrument."
I rather suspect that it was simply called a "Metonic Kalendar."
This device is too complex to be a one-off project. Its elaborate structure must have been refined over some long period by a group of dedicated intellectuals and/or craftsmen.
This implies that there must have been many such devices. They also appeared in numerous versions.
Bronze and wood were workaday materials for the period; any device considered to be a unique marvel would have gotten more elaborate treatment. This is an academic product.
Historical clockmaker Michael Wright has reconstructed one, in a solo workshop.
The ancient world may have had more geared machinery than we now know. A simpler hypothesis suggests that the Antikythera Device is not related to our ideas about geared engineering. It may have arisen from directly geometrical drawings – as a manifestation of epicycle theory.
Some original inventor – maybe a colleague of Archimedes, who was fond of drawing circles in sand – may have realized that geometrical sand-drawings could be sand-casted in molten metal. In other words, this highly anachronistic device may represent a direct imaginative leap between astronomy and what we would now call machinery. There was no lost world of gearwork; there was one imaginative breakthrough within the discipline of Greek astronomy.
The original, simple Kalendar then saw considerable academic refinement. But Kalendars never became common objects. Its metaphysical builders could not imagine that the mechanical principles might find simpler uses in everyday life.
REFERENCES:
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7204/abs/nature07130.html
