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The Antikythera Mechanism - a 2000-year-old astronomical clock

lpetrich

lpetrich

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Today's Google doodle is about the 115th anniversary of the discovery of the  Antikythera mechanism in a shipwreck off the coast of a Greek island between Crete and the mainland. The machine itself is a contemporary of Julius Caesar, but similar machines were likely built earlier and around that time.

The Antikythera mechanism is a 2,000-year-old computer - Vox has Antikythera mechanism working model.mov - YouTube a video of someone demonstrating a reconstruction of this device.
The mechanism had several dials and clock faces, each which served a different function for measuring movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, but they were all operated by one main crank:
  • Little stone or glass orbs that would have moved across the machine’s face to show the motion of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in the night sky
  • The position of the sun and moon, relative to the 12 constellations of the zodiac
  • Another dial forecasting solar and lunar eclipses — and, oddly, predictions about their color. (Researchers guess that different colored eclipses were considered omens of the future. The ancient Greeks were a little superstitious.)
  • A solar calendar, charting the 365 days of the year
  • A lunar calendar, counting a 19-year lunar cycle
  • A tiny pearl-size ball that rotated to show you the phase of the moon
  • And this is pretty neat: another dial of the mechanism that counted down the days to regularly scheduled sporting events around the Greek isles, like the Olympics
Click to expand...
The machine used lots of gears in it to do its calculations, thus making it a sort of analog clock or orrery -- a sort of specialized analog computer.

The Antikythera mechanism is the only survivor of its kind, and its survival is likely due to the shipwreck of the ship that was used to carry it. But there are literary references to similar machines, notably by author Marcus Tullius Cicero.


Clockwork machines with similar sophistication did not become common again until the later Middle Ages, some 600 - 700 years ago.
 
To my knowledge the makers of this device did not know that what we call "planets" were actually planets like the Earth. They were just other points of light that moved differently than typical stars. That is important to understand.
 
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