TechStuff Classic: The Oldest Computer

Computer Enjoy. So, Joe, why would you like to talk about? Well, um, on forward thinking, we usually talk about the future in or another and um so I wanted to go in completely the opposite direction and talk about the technology of the past. And I started thinking, I wonder, what's the oldest computer that we know about? Oh? I got you. So we're talking nine with any AC, right, that computer that you would end up programming with lots of plugs and switches, not at all? Wow? No? So wait are you?

You're saying it's older than that? Older? Okay? Alright, well find how about the ninety two that's the Tennis soft Berry Computer or ABC, which was built at Iowa State College which now university. Obviously, but there was there was a patent dispute actually that was decided in the United States government about whether ENIAC or the ABC computer were first, and ultimately they said that it. Uh, you could not have anyone to claim they were the ones to invent

the computer. That's the first one, right, ABC computer. Okay, alright, N one. We're starting to get a little fuzzy here, but alright, so Conrad Zeus builds the Z three computer. And that was also the same year when the first bomba was built, you know, one of the devices meant to help decrypt German messages. That's it, right, No, alright. Nineteen thirty nine, George Stimmits completes the complex number calculator, the CNC at Bell Telephone Laboratories. We just finished talking

about Bell Labs. This has got to be it. And even in the first demonstration he used teletype so that he could program this remotely over special telephone line. So it was the first remote computer as well. So that's it, right. I think you need to think less electricity fine, fine.

Seven the analytical Engine. Charles Babbage, he designs this, never finishes it in his lifetime, but of course that is the device that Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers, had possibly even created computer programs for algorithms, where she envisioned a time where you could encode things like music and poetry into mathematics. That's it, the analytical engine. Okay, so we're gonna talk about that. You're you're about two tho years off, say what not about almost? Okay, so what

are you talking about? I'm talking about something that is called the antique antique kith ant Oh, we're gonna have this problem the whole time. The anti cythera me yes, the anti cithera mechanism are also known as the antikathera mechanism. Yeah, it all depends on the or you know, which pronunciation you follow. Antikythera seems to be fairly commonplace. So we're gonna go ahead and use that one and probably switch

off without even thinking about it. All right, I know a little bit about this, but I guess before we talk about this mechanism, maybe we need to say what the heck is anti Cithera. For anyone who is not familiar with the the geography of Greece, you may not know this. This refers to a place. Yeah, it's an island in the Mediterranean Sea. And if you um, if you imagine you're looking at the Mediterranean, it's the small island that's between Crete to the south and the Peloponnesian

Peninsula up to the north. So the mainland of Greece and it's right there in the middle. Um, there's a bigger island just called Cithera, and this is a smaller one offset from it called Anti cither So if Anti Cithera and O throw where to collide, it would just destroy one another. Yeah, total positronic REVERSI yeah, you tell them about the twinkie, so you know, joking aside, Does that mean that this is where that mechanism was was made? Um? No,

probably not. This is where the mechanism was discovered. So I got its name, gotcha. So someone was walking around Antikithera one day and they stubbed their toe and oh what's this and found the world's oldest computer. No, it's much creepier. Um okay, So the story goes like this. Around the year nineteen hundred, there was a group of sponge divers who were off the coast of Antikithera and they were doing their diving. I guess whatever sponge divers do.

They were gathering sponges, gathering sponges to wash all their dishes exactly. Um, so they were doing their thing. But apparently one of the divers came up to the surface and he was like, guys, there are dead women lying all over the bottom of the ocean. There's a bunch of naked dead ladies at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, sounds creepy, but studios. Yeah. Actually what he was seeing

were statues. There were bronze and marble statues that were part of the payload of a almost well I guess about exactly to two year old ship wreck of a ship that was a Roman ship, a large Roman ship carrying a lot of cargo, much of it probably stolen or looted cargo. Right, we're talking at an era just around the time when the Romans were beginning to uh, let's say, incorporate the Hellenistic societies into their empire by force. So it had all these Greek artifacts on it, yeah,

and luxury items, like really expensive stuff in the Greek world. Yeah. And so the idea is, we don't know exactly what the ship was doing. What we think it was probably a ship that was returning to Rome from some destination

uh in the Greek world. Yeah, and so there are a lot of these Greek artifactsically currency, uh, they had, like you said, statues, they had lots of pottery, um, and they had this this device, which was well, at first, it was just a lump, right, yeah, right, yeah, first, Well, and of course it didn't get that much attention early on because there was so much other stuff down there

in that shipwreck. Right, So the people who went in to really investigate the shipwreck and take a look and see what was going on, they didn't necessarily realize that there was something truly special, something that was beyond just uh special from an artistic merit point of view, but could tell us a lot about how much the ancient Greeks knew about craftsmanship, about astronomy, about math, all of these things we've become apparent, but only a hundred years later, right,

so after the explorer. So so it it's it's forgotten for two thousand years essentially, and then for another hundred years we don't really know what it is. So it's kind of this lump of roded bronze inside what what used to be a wooden box essentially disintegrated. Yeah, so there's like there's one big remaining lump, but they're about eighty two fragments in total, right, right, So one of those fragments, the main fragment, has the vast majority of the what we know of as the inner workings of

whatever this device was supposed to be. And we know a lot more about now, but don't want to ruin the surprise. No, But so basically we can say, like what it was made of. So what they think now is, Okay, this looks like it was some kind of collection of bronze gears inside of a wooden casing. Yeah. In fact, at first they thought it might only be just one gear that somehow was loose from something else, and then they realized, no, there's actually several gears here, but it's

all corroded together. Yeah, it's it's sort of like a fused into a big bottom of the ocean snotball, Yeah, exactly, that's very accurate. Um. But so if you can imagine I would call like imagine a mid sized dictionary, not like a pocket dictionary, but also not that huge one from the library that you couldn't see. It's on a pedestalia like a like a large hardback dictionary. Um, and it's got a wooden casing, so you could open that casing up and then inside you've got this corroded mass

that uh, that is all this gear formation. Now, of course the wooden casing doesn't really remain except in rotted fragmentary form um. But that's the basic mechanism we're dealing with. And if you start to look at it, you would see this one big gear um. But you might wonder what does this thing do? Yeah, and beyond that, I mean, before we even get to that, like how old is

this thing? Oh? Yeah, because I mean we we figured that the shipwreck happens sometime around eight five BC before common eras because mostly because of the dates that we found and I say we, but the explorers found on the current. Yeah. You know, sometimes Joe and I we get we get tired of working on stuff or for thinking, we pop out to the Greek islands and then just

go well skin diving. Yeah, you know. And X, by the way does mark the spot now, but we by dating things like the currency, they have sort of narrowed the ranged around five b C. But that that doesn't necessarily mean that's how old the device is. No, they think that the device is older than the wreck. It wasn't built like right before that. It's generally dated between a hundred and a hundred and fifty b C. So it's thought of as a second century BC device, right,

So so it is an ancient device. Uh, that seems to be about how old it is. Uh, we've got some ideas of where it may have come from. There were some, No, we don't we don't have any The instruction manual for this device was not anywhere to be found. It was not on the glove compartment of the shipwreck, so we can't be absolutely certain. Uh, there's some speculation that maybe it was the island of Rhodes, which was

known for its scholar ship and also it's craftsmanship. But there are some other options as well that we can talk about. But beyond that, Um, you know, we've talked about what was made of, we talked about how old it was, but yeah, what what did this thing do? And at first it was a real mystery. In fact, for like we said, like a century, it was a mystery. We just didn't have enough information to be able to

determine that. We had some wild guests. There were people who made some good guesses, but they didn't know the full extent yet. Um, and that they didn't realize initially how awesome this thing was. You know, we can make an argument that this is the oldest computer, which obviously means that it has to do more than just have

some inner work, inner working gears that moved smoothly. It has to do something beyond that, because otherwise anything that was reliant on gears and clockwork you could call a computer. But we'll get into exactly what it is that this thing did. That kind of makes us consider it more of a computer device and analog computer than some sort

of interesting clockwork. Right. So, um, but in general, what we understand it to have been able to do, and in fact we understand a lot more about it in very recent years than we had for the century leading up to it. Oh well, I'd say now we've basically had a slam dunk on this one. Recent recent revelations have shown us, oh, this is pretty much exactly what it is. Yeah, which is phenomenal when you think of

how badly and repair this thing was. But but ultimately what it does is it's it's a device that not only tracks celestial events and the movement of celestial bodies in relation to our perspective here on Earth, it also

predicts them. So, in other words, you not only can you can you keep track of what's going on, and it could give you an indication of where you would need to look in the sky if you wanted to see something like marsh It also would tell you that, oh, on this particular date, you will have a full solar eclipse. It's kind of cool. Yeah. In other words, an ask

atronomical calculator, yes, um. And so what it would do is it would have a position of the Earth and then um by moving the hand crank, which which no

longer exists, but that's that's what figure. It was a hand crank that that provided the the kinetic energy to make everything turn by moving that you could see at the same time, based on a projected date in the future, the positions of the Sun, of the Moon, um, probably of the planets we don't know the planet gears are missing right now, probably at least the planets that the Greeks knew about, which included the probably not the planets that probably not the we don't think well, not Neptune

Uranus or if you want to be kind, Pluto um. They they had identified as far out as Saturn. Now, if in fact we were to find evidence that it included these other planets as well as far as we know they didn't know about. Then that would the third part of our conversation to get a little more interesting. It also had yeah, as you said, an eclipse prediction dial uh and that's really cool. Uh. And it also

predicted cultural events. Yeah, that's true, like the Olympiad, right, because you had a schedule of when that would take place, and so by plotting it against this device and actually inscribing it on the device, you could in a factor then you could see what the what the celestial events were going to be at a planned future event that way, which is kind of handy. Um. But we'll talk specifically.

We need to really get into the nitty gritty of how this is possible, and then we'll conclude at the end talking about how we know all of this stuff, because, as you're gonna learn, it's really complicated to figure out how a device works if you can't actually visualize all the gears when you first get hold of it. Before we get into that conversation, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So we've got a cool sponsor today,

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So let's talk about how this device actually tracked celestial events. Okay, so we we know they are all these gears. There's a hand cranky turn. It moves things forwards that you can look at what the celestial conditions are on any given date, or you can even advance it so that

you can look for a specific celestial event. Let's say you're looking specifically for when is the next eclipse going to occur, So you're not looking to see what the celestial scott, what the sky is going to look like, um, three months from now, you just want to know when the next eclipse is. You could advance the handle from your date and keep doing it until you saw the eclipse information come up and then compare that see what

the date is. On the other part of the indicator, we'll talk about all the different dial This would be indicated by a dial, so it's like it's like an analog clock face. You would be spinning around a point to let you know when this is coming exactly, and then you could say, oh, all right, so the next eclipse is in you know, you know, three months and two weeks from now or whatever. And uh so there's

a lot of different ways you could use this. Well, um, there were about thirty thirty one gears that we know of, probably at least at least more or at least thirty probably more. So it's I think hypothesized that there were more to deal with the movement of the planets that that's just lost. And you know, it's not a surprise because again, like I said, when we call it bad repair, I mean you're you think about this. This is like essentially the imagine a clock that's been fused into one piece.

I mean an old style gear clock fused into one piece that's kind of and it's it's opaque, so you can't see these gears that are on the inside just with the naked eye. But we'll get into how we figured more about this in a little bit. But so you had all these different dials that would mark different events,

uh and different time spans. Right, so you would have a dial that would be set up for for just regular keeping of of the calendar year, but there were also dials that were more attuned to specific celestial cycles. So for example, there might be a nineteen year cycle that's represented by one dial, another one had, I think a seventy five year dial, And these dials were to refer to things that patterns that would repeat once you hit those time frames, so like every nineteen years, this

one set of pattern would repeat itself. So that's why they have these different dials to indicate exactly what's happening at exactly what time. Uh. What I loved was the idea that there was one gear specifically devoted to showing the phase of the moon, So not only would you see the position of the moon on any given date, but you would also see what phase it was in, whether it was waxing or waning, a new moon and fullman whatever, and and uh, I really thought that was

very clever. So yeah, you essentially either either refer to the dates and look at the celestial events to compare the two, or you would said it so that you would look at a specific configuration of the celestial body

and then look at what date corresponded to it. It's um kind of amazing to imagine the complex planning and craftsmanship that went into a machine like this, because, um, when you start thinking about it, okay, say somebody set you down and told you to try to build something like this, and you had you know, it was open book test. You knew what time frame all these celestial

events would occur in. How would you do it? Yeah, I mean God, so you would kind of figure out the relationships between the sizes of gears, um and the way they would interlock to create fractional relations ships between the movements of all the different bodies at the same time.

And keep in mind that if this thing is reflecting say planets and stuff like that, well, from a geocentric point of view, the movement of the planets is not just a simple circle, right, I mean you see them, they persiss and then they go backwards and all things exactly. So if you and there's a fellow named Michael T. Wright who built a replica of this device, and we'll talk more about him probably in a bit, but he there's a great video that demonstrates him using this machine

to show the movement of these different elements. And sometimes you see them moving kind of backward compared to other elements, and you think, Wow, the gears have to account for that too. The gears have to be able to do very complex movements of these uh these these arms that are on these dials in order to reflect what is

really happening. And while the model itself uh US depict a geocentric view of celestial bodies, we can't be sure that the person who built it necessarily ascribed necessarily ascribed to a geocentric philosophy. Oh, that's certainly true because for the device's function, I mean it was it was functionally geocentric, right, because we're preserving from exactly even if the person who made it actually thought the Earth went around the Sun,

it would still look the same pretty much. Because if you're reflecting how the world, how the how the celestial you know, elements look compared to being on the Earth, it makes no sense to make it anything other than geocentric. So the heliocentric theories had been placed ahead of when we think this device was made. So it's possible we don't know because there were still people who who's ascribed

to a geocentric worldview. I'd probably say that was dominant, yeah, because because it was similar to what we would see centuries later, where to propose such a thing as a helos helio centric view would mean that you might suffer a little bit of let's say, you might get ostracized

with extreme prejudice that people didn't like here in that. Yeah, So anyway, you know, it does look like it was going to show you not only the Sun and Moon's movements, which is already complex enough because they don't move at the same rate, or you know they change positions uh differently relative to one another, than to throw in the other planets makes that or the plants that the Greeks

knew about makes it even more complex. It's Charity from twenty eight he's the oldest podcaster here to say we're going to take a quick break and hopefully when we come back it will be less cringe worthy. So here's the question, does this count as a computer? I would say absolutely. I would say so to you, and I've got a little argument here. Tell me what you think about so um, I'd say the basic definition of a computer.

A lot of times it's included that it's electronic, but let's take that part out and say, well, whether or not it's electronic. Um, a computer is like an interactive machine that can and these words often come up, store, retrieve, and process data. That's fair. Um, so it's like input, output and processing and storage. Yeah. I always think of it as something that can can take input, put it through some form of algorithm, meaning a set of rules, and then give you output on the other side. And

it's predictable. It's going to do that the same way. Like, assuming that you put in the same input and you're running it through the same algorithm, you're always going to get the same output. Okay, so both definitions work very well together. Yeah, I'd say the biggest distinction is that today's computers we think of as being general use. So you you have hardware that can compute, but you've all got software to boss the hardware around so it can

tell it to compute in different ways. Right. So in that way, you can have a single machine allow you to do Excel spreadsheets or play you know, the first person shooter game. Right. But obviously without electronics, this this ancient computer doesn't have software. It just has hardware. Or it's like thinking about a computer that can only run one program, which is not that difficult to imagine. I mean, if you if you think of calculators as a subset

of computers. Calculators like your basic calculator. I'm not talking about your super crazy calculators that have apps on them and everything, but your basic calculator does basic calculator functions. It's, you know, again, taking that input, putting it through an algorithm, some sort of mathematical process, and you get an output similar to this device. Yeah. So this device, it's like

a computer that only has one job. But within that job, I think it's definitely worth saying it's a computer because its stores data. So the relationships between in the astronomical pathways are represented by the mechanical math that's done between the teeth and the gears. So like the gear sizes themselves are sort of storing that data. Sure um. And then it takes input. You turn the hand crank to give it the input of the date you want to calculate,

and then it gives you output. It's got the dials that reflect the computed values of the of what you're looking for. And even as I have said before, you could do it the other way where you keep turning the dial until you get the configuration you were interested in, and then you look at the date, so it works

in either sense, and uh, pretty phenomenal. I mean, it's when you think about how precise you have to be to make sure you get this and only that, but just the huge amount of information you have to have at your disposal to even start in the craftsmanship of this thing. Because the Greeks had a lot of of information about astronomy, some of it they got from the Babylonians. So the Babylonians were known as is very much interested

in astronomy. The Greeks were as well, and so they had to have had all this observation data that they had, the things that they had observed about the movement of celestial objects in the sky and how those patterns would arise in order for them to plan that out into a mechanical device. And that to me is really amazing because you're not talking about, oh, you know, every four weeks, this one event happens. Now, some of these cycles, like

I said, are incredibly long. You had a nineteen year cycle, you had a seventy six year cycle, you had a fifty four year cycle. All of these were taken into account to explain the movement of celestial objects in various ways. Whether it's a solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse, or that you get both a lunar and a solar eclipse within a certain amount of time, not to mention the movement of the other planets. That's a lot of information that you have to have compiled before you ever cut

into a sheet of bronze. Uh. Yes, it certainly is. And and even harder is imagining how you would begin to compute that data. Yeah, I mean nobody. Um, well, actually this is a good question, Um, had anybody ever made anything like this before? Obviously we don't know for sure, right, well, we don't have evidence. This is the earliest existing device. In fact, we don't have any other devices to point to.

And let's be clear when we're calling it the earliest known computer that that doesn't mean we think that there's nothing that like this that could have come before. It just means the it's the earliest one that we have so and we don't have any others. It's not like

there are you know, twenty other examples of this. In fact, if you want to look at for another object that's as complex as this one, you have to go about fifteen hundred years further into the early Renaissance and look at the Middle East, China, and Europe for devices that start to equal this level of complexity. Yet, however, these historians of mechanical engineering, they say, this kind of stuff doesn't show up until late medieval clockwork. It's like, yeah,

at the earliest. So when you take that into account, you think, well, you know, is this is this an anomaly? Is it a one off that some mad genius come up with us? But if you if you were to actually carefully examine those gears, and we'll talk more about how people have done that over the last decade or so, if you were to very carefully examine them, you would see that they appear to have been made flawlessly, like

there were no mistakes. Uh. You know, a lot of experts have said that if you were to build, say a clock, and it's your first clock, it may be a functional clock, but if you were to look at the clockwork, you might see where there were mistakes that were made and then corrected for later on. There No, there's no evidence of that in this device, which suggests that whoever built it had done it at least a few times before to perfect the whole process. Before building

another one. Yeah, and combined with the fact that this thing is just so smart that it suggests it was probably not the only one of its kind. It probably came from a line of similar devices, maybe of advancing complexity. And you might think, well, if this is the case, where the heck is everything else and well, some of

it could just be lost or destroyed. And also being made up of bronze means that it's a valuable resource which occasionally for other purposes, like I don't know, war, you would melt down so that you could use it for other stuff. Yeah, I mean, think about what we're talking about the first and second century b C. In the Hellenistic world. I mean, it's it's a time when stuff might have gotten grabbed and taken to another place, melted down, or just lost, just like just like this

one was lost. There's lots stuff going on if you look at and we should mention this stuff you missed in History Class Sister podcast they did an episode on this same topic. Fantastic episode, highly committed, you should definitely

go listen to it. Um. But one of the things they pointed out was that if you look at bronze statues from that era, they're very very few of them, and I think like nine out of ten came from shipwrecks because the ones that were left on land, more frequently than not had been melted down for other purposes. So it's it's one of those There was not necessarily a sense of permanency in this time of the world. Okay, so we don't have, like, in terms of archaeology, another

device like this from the time. Has anybody ever described a device like this from the time? Uh, that's a good question. Do you have any actual information on that? Because when I was looking for it, that was it seemed to me at the time that everyone was absolutely shocked by this device because it didn't seem to have any kind of shock shocked to the point where they were wondering if it was perhaps a hoax, that maybe someone had planted this thing and it was a fake.

But it may be that there are sources I'm I'm aware of. Do you know any I think there are ancient descriptions of ore ries. Okay, so those are wouldn't be exactly like this, but sort of ancient models of the movement of the Planet's interesting. So yeah, and of course we do know that there were philosophers who had described uh, the very motions that this device enacted that you know they were they were just describing it for scholarly purposes, and this device would show that in action

if you were to move the handle. Well, here's an interesting question. Who built this thing? Yeah? Where did it come from? We don't. We don't know, is the short answer. We have some suspicions. Uh. Sometimes the name Archimedes gets thrown around there. Yeah, so one clue is just that Archimedes he was around, you know, a century before this, and he was a genius inventor and uh or at least we assume, so some of his inventions we cannot

actually be certain we're ever built. But sure, come on, he built a death ray just just in mind, death ray, okay, probably and a giant a giant arm that would upset besieging ships. I'd want to believe, I understand. Okay. So uh, well, is that the only evidence that it might have been our comedies? Well, no, Archimedes, as you might remember, was from he lived in Syracuse in the which is unfortunate. Yeah, well,

unfortunate for our comedies. Uh. He lived in Syracuse. And an interesting fact about the device that we discovered later is that. Okay, So the device has inscriptions all over it, very faint inscriptions, and they're hard to read because of all the corrosion from the thousands of years. But what they discovered was, oh, okay, actually we can make out some of these with some of this imaging we're about to talk about in the next section. And it's in

coin A Greek. So that was sort of like coin A Greek was the lingua franca of the Hellenistic world, and you know, people spoke it all over the place. But the calendar that was represented on here reflected the kind of calendar that would be used in the Ionian area, which would include Syracuse. Right, So that that gives at least some again circumstantial evidence that perhaps our commedee could

have been involved in this. Then again, our comedies probably died too early to have made this particular device due to an over zealous soldier. We know he died in I think to twelve BC and the device was made in the probably sometime between, right, So yeah, that does put some he died too early to have personally made it, right, maybe he made an earlier one. Yeah, And that's one idea is that it could have come out of a sort of a Syracuse based school of our comedies maybe.

And again, the Island of Rhodes is another example that people have have per presented saying that they were very much on that island, there was a scholarly center that was devoted to astronomy, and that they also had craftsmen who worked in clockwork type devices. So it's possible that it could have originated from that area. We just we don't know. There's some clues there, but we we don't know for sure. Yeah. Another name I just want to

mention real quick that gets brought up is Hipparcos. Hipparcos Hippocaus of of Nicia. And he was a Greek astronomer um and geographer and he did the maths. He was a smart guy trigonometry right, yeah, he he was also uh he wasn't Hippocrates, but anyway, he he He also was known for describing the movements of the sun in

the moon, right and uh. And some indications that it maybe could have had something to do with him, or that the astronomical theories that are reflected in this, including like the movement of the moon reflects his thoughts about the movement, So it may not be that he had a direct hand in it, but that perhaps a student or someone familiar with his work took the theory and put it into a physical object. Okay, but I have another theory about who created it. Yeah, I have a feeling.

I know what you're gonna say. But hit me with it, buddy. Okay, Well, it goes like this, This mechanism is way too advanced to have been built by human beings at the time. Obviously it was built by a aliens be time traveler see transdimensional reptilians. Right, so um or or sorry d um, like a super advanced secret human society that we don't know about, like Atlantis, but we do know about them,

we don't think they exist, all right. So all right, and Joe, I know you're you're presenting this as a tongue in cheek because you and I share a common opinion on this about how it's absolutely ridiculous nonsense to assume this. Yeah, for one thing, it it really it really says a lot about the cynicism of people when it comes to the creativity of human beings and ingenuity and our ability to process complex thoughts and bring them

into reality, you know. I mean it's the same argument that no, the Pyramids, no human could have built those. Actually thousands of humans built those. Tens of thousands of humans built those. Yeah, it's um, it's not like somebody in ancient Greece building a warp drive, right, It's it's somebody who was building something that was totally available to someone with the technology of the time. All they had

to be was really really smart, right. Yeah. That we know that the astronomical knowledge was there, you know, the scholarship was there. We know that the bronze working was there. We know that people there were craftsmen who generally wasn't as good as this, right, but there were craftsmen who could create incredible bowl works. A lot of bronze U Now, a lot of those that haven't survived because of again

the fact that people would melt stuff down. But the ones that have survived have shown that there's you know, there has there was a level of artistry there. Yeah, it's I think the bottom line is it's quite exceptional for its time, but it's not unthinkable. And so we are discounting the the alien slash time travel or slash Reptilian. So whatever, I mean, if it was from Aliens, you'd think that, you know, it would reflect a little more

complete astronomical knowledge, might be electronic or something. Also, it wouldn't be geocentric. Really talked about it, you know, it's functionally geocentric, even though the person who made it might have been right. But why would an alien bother to make something from Earth's perspective when oh, yeah, they could make an oory from the outside right, including the Earth revolving around the Sun. Yeah, why would they do? Yeah?

I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me. Not knowing about planets past Saturn, you know that they just thought those were those were not really high up on the list. Yeah, you don't wanna, you don't want to visit those? Yeah, So I think we can discount the whole alien hypothesis. Hey, it's Jonathan from I kicked out the old man who was talking into my microphone. We're going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back alright. So we have discussed what it was, we

discussed how it worked. How do we know that it did this thing? I mean, you are you're talking about a giant hunk of corroded bronze. How could you possibly ever figure out what this thing actually did? As we already mentioned, people originally did not know. They had no idea what this honk was capable of. For a century, we really didn't know. We had some people make some guesses occasionally, but for the most part, it wasn't until we were able to use something far more sophisticated than

just our own eyeballs to look at it. We had to use X rays, and with the X rays, initially, the X rays showed that there were lots of gears inside this hunk of corroded bronze, and that they were connected in some way. But those early X rays were not perfect. Mostly they due to the fact that you couldn't tell depth with it, so you couldn't see how the gears were connected. It was like a massive gears, but you weren't sure where where they were in relation

to one another. Um But enter something called three D X ray. Yeah, where you start tomography, Yes, scanning it from all different angles using different approaches. Did you did you come across the powerful X ray machines called blade Runner? No? I didn't. Yeah, yeah, so blade Runner X ray machines. Sorry, They used lots of different X ray machines throughout the study of this device. As we began to learn that this was far more important from a historical perspective than

anyone had had thought leading up to this. I mean, everyone was thinking that these other artifacts were really important and this other thing was a curiosity. But as we learned more about it, we realized, well, this thing is amazing. Uh. Well, the the various X ray devices we use showed more of the relation of all these different gears, so we got to see how they were laid out inside this

hunk of corroded bronze. But the blade Runner device, all right, So it was an X ray machine that was designed to look for tiny cracks and turbine blades. That's what the original design of these machines was for and to tell whether or not you're a replicant. Also to tell yeah, I would ask you if a turtle is on its back,

what do you do? Why doesn't mechanism turn the turtle over? Yeah, So anyway, it would look for these tiny It was designed so that you could detect the tiniest of cracks and turbine blades, so that you could do maintenance before a catastrophic failure. They used it to look at this device, the anti anti cithera device. We keep avoiding saying it so that I don't fall over myself. Let's say it three times together, Jonathan, Okay, so that's fantastic, all right,

Now you have to say it backwards. No. Um. So the Antikithera device, the blade Runner thing, it looks at it, and it actually is able to see because it has such precise measurements. It's able to to to distinguish what the tiny shallow carvings are on those dials. That's how we were able to read the word inscription. The inscriptions, yeah, because some of them were just very faded already, even before you talk about the corrosion effort in there or

element in there, i should say. And the blade Runner X rays were able to measure these very tiny changes in the surface of these different dials, and that's how we were able to see what the writing was and thus able to really um translated and figure out what this thing actually did. And that's how people once they started reading it, once they started being able to read the writing, it became clear that this was a far more sophisticated to vice than what what predecessors were thinking.

Even the earliest guesses were things that probably can predict solar and lunar movements, or maybe it's some form of calendar, but it No one was really aware of how sophisticated it was until we were able to take this closer look.

And I think it's pretty phenomenal what we've learned about it so far, Like those shallow engravings have told us pretty much everything we need to know about its basic function, and that's how we're able to draw some conclusions and clear the conclusions that lad Michael t right to build his replica of the device to the point where he's got a working replica. Uh it, as far as we can tell, it's as accurate to the original as we

can possibly get. Yeah, you should look this up on YouTube and see it, because it's not just a model. It is a working replica. He built the machine. He used very similar methods as to what the ancient Greeks would have. He used the same sort of dimension of gears. Uh. You know, keeping in mind that we don't he's working

from an incomplete model. Even with our very very sophisticated techniques these days, you can't see what's not there, right, there's still some missing pieces that we don't really have. You know, he was able to recreate it based upon what we think the device was meant to do and his works and then the videos are amazing. When you watch the just the minute movements of each of these pieces in relation to one another and think of how

complex this is, it's mind blowing. It's well, and it's also it's a it's a gorgeous device, you know, It's just it's a beautiful device. You would look at and you might think Originally, if you were just to glance at it, you might think it was either a really weird clock or maybe some sort of navigational equipment for like a ship or something, just because you've got bronze and wood there. But um, yeah, once you get a deeper understanding of what it is, it's pretty pretty nifty.

I think the replica was made with brass instead of product. I think you're right. I think it was brass instead of bronze. So yeah, even more ship like then with the brass and would combination. Yeah. There's recent scholarship going on with a project called the Anti Kit through a mechanism research project that's a collaborative project between lots of different research organizations and individuals. Yeah, there's a mathematician named Tony Freethe and UH he's been using imaging technology to

get to the bottom of questions that remain about the mechanism. Yeah. They the group, the research group was founded in two thousand five and has been extremely active. They have sponsored several museum exhibitions throughout the world. I think right now as the record of this podcast, at least some of the device is on display in UH in a museum

in Athens, but I believe that ends in January. Yeah, it's the it's an exhibition and called the Antikittheras Shipwreck, the ship the Treasures and the mechanism, and it's at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. YEA. And so that of course has more than than the device itself. It also has examples of the other stuff that was found in that shipwreck, which, by the way, people have gone back to that shipwreck and found more things around

it since that initial discovery. UM. And so there's there's also been a lot of symposia that they've held. They've had a lot of gatherings where they they combine research and they published that research. There's lots of information on their website about the device and the circumstances around its discovery and just the process of discovery as we used more and more sophisticated techniques to examine it. And it's really a great resource. I highly recommend visiting that website.

I'll link to that on our Facebook page and Twitter handle so you guys can see it, because it's pretty neat stuff. I mean, it's um, you know. I really enjoyed reading about the process they went through as they would learn more and more, and of course that hasn't finished. In fact, there's there's one thing, one question besides who built it that we don't know the answer to yet, which is why did they build it? Like? Why is it? Was it? What? What was the in purpose? Was it

a scholarly tool? Was it so that they could uh create, you know, specifically plan out events to coincide with celestial events, so that perhaps it was a political tool. You know, maybe if if an eclipse is seen as a bad omen, you may want to avoid planning some big event around an eclipse just so that people don't think that the event itself is cursed. I mean it's I'm sure in the ancient world you could probably get some amount of

power just by being able to accurately predict eclipses. Yeah. Yeah, and that's another possibility. It could just be religious power or political power. We don't know, And it's possible that as much as we can learn about this device, maybe we never really figure out with any degree of certainty who built it or why it was built. In fact, I'd be amazed if we ever are able to figure out who built it. That would be phenomenal to me. Unless someone's like, oh, look here there's an inscription on

the bottom, Johan from Sweden. What that would That would be a big upset, But not that I think that would ever happen. But yeah, I mean it was I want to float. Another possibility steampunks, all right, so steampunk cost players. Yeah, but I'm thinking that it was a steampunk convention. A certain doctor showed up at it, accidentally ended up grabbing this device, and on a further adventure, maybe three episodes down the line, ended up accidentally dunking

it into the ocean off the coast degrease. That's exactly what happened. Um, explains everything. Uh, did you see the

the lego really cool? Now, this wasn't We probably might not want to call it a replica because it's not trying to copy the form of the original, just the function, right, And even the function it was I think a limited part of it because it was really showing things like eclipses in the uh in the the lego version, I don't think it necessarily showed all the movements that the Antikitthera device showed, because I was when I watched the videos that this is really clever because it would show

you the the date and uh when the next eclipse would occur, whether it was solar or Luna or both. But it didn't um both as in like a region of time when both would occur, not both occurring at the same time. UM necessarily, But the the it didn't tell you things. It didn't tell you things like the movement of the planets as far as I could tell. So it was it had a limited set of functions that the Antikithera device actually did. But it was still

really cool to watch. It was really cool. Let me tell you, I'm going to invented device and it's gonna tell you it'll predict when the sun passes in front of the moon that will be a bad day. I'm gonna make sure I stay indoors that day. What does that call that's called like A? I think that's I think that's called well, it doesn't really matter because we're No. That's essentially called boy. It's sure as vaporized outside today, isn't it. Ah? Yeah, No, that would not not go

over well. And that wraps up this classic episode about the oldest computer. Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future topics or perhaps requests that I never ever do an old man voice ever again, which is legit, you can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an

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