Meet the Antikythera Mechanism
- December 1st, 2006
- 7 Comments
If you want a real gadget, nerds, then you need to look to the great grandaddy of them all, the Antikythera Mechanism. Discovered in 1901 off the coast of Antikythera island in Greece, the wooden box with intricate gears, and its function, remained a mystery.
Until this week, that is, when a team of researchers announced that it was a staggeringly advanced analog computer that was used to predict the location of sunrises, sunsets, lunar phases, and possibly even the positions of the known planets.
The device had been studied for years, but the team used complex X-Ray tomography to discover the exact configuration of the 30 gears and built a virtual replica, the key to understanding the device and how it worked.
What’s fascinating is that this gadget’s technology didn’t resurface until over a millennium later in medieval Europe’s clock towers. Nobody knows who really made it, or for who, or even really why. All we know is that it existed and what it was used for. Makes waiting in line for a PS3 seem rather idiotic, doesn’t it, fanboy?
webonics (Who am I?)
1 year ago
The really question is…Did the Greeks ever offer the Antikythera 2.0 in pink??
Cool article. I read about this about a year ago and if you consider the time of its origin, it was an advancement for civilization by light years.
endless-t (Who am I?)
1 year ago
And so if it hadn’t been lost at sea, we’d be looking at the PlayStation Millennium Edition?
Paul (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Speaking as a fanboy, a box with a bunch of gears is not much fun to play with unless it was an Xbox360 with Gears of War ;)
drdrew (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Old news [pun intended ;)]. This thing is just plain cool, period, I want one, seriously. Mechanical (non electric) devices are fun; not to mention a great conversation piece and can be a fun challenge if it’s “assembly required”. Discovery airs a segment on this every once in a while, so keep an eye for it. Here we are so much more ‘technologically advanced’ than at that time, yet I bet that thing never crashed…hmmm…
JP (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Did it run Linux?
adi (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Screw Linux, the real question is, “Does it play Doom?”
Kirby (Who am I?)
1 year ago
I wanna know if there’s a vibrator attachment. Will Jobs make an iMechanism version for comsumers? I’ll be it runs the java VM well. [insert your own dumb tech joke here].
And yes, it ran Linux.