Antikythera Mechanism

Ancients could build complex mechanical devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism maybe the technology was even older.

Impressive. People in old days are rather creative in getting the most out of the existing technology.

Oh. I got it now. Ancient technology and ancient engineering problems :)

A common sentiment when viewing something like this is "wow, they were far more sophisticated then we imagined," but it's taken me a while to think instead "we're not much more sophisticated than them.The Clickspring guy isn't just making this replica, he's doing so using materials and tools available at the time. Several videos show him just making tools: taking simple iron and fashioning a tool like a chisel, then case hardening it and using it to make a

> It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were more advanced at some point in time than previously believed -- happen quite frequently.I think part of it is that we operate on a different timescale now.We are used to being able to build big things quickly, or make things that require precise machining quickly. And so of course we can also build small things, or make less sophisticated things, even quicker.If it would take a lifetime to build something or make something, we don&

Only recently there is growing evidence that there are ancient artifacts made with precisions/symmetry/accuracy that could only have been approached in the last 50 years.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyQQRNoQaEThat doesn't explain what happened to the tools, but that might be attributable to rust, death of small numbers of experts by war/famine/cataclysm/disease, and wid

the techicall ability to make the Antikythera wasn't lost - just the free cash to spend on such 'toys' that were a lot of effort to make relative to the value.

It wasn't so much that the technique is still the same that struck me, so much as that the technique, and the technology to fabricate using it, existed 3500 years ago!

Fascinating look at technology history. People in the past may not have had modern materials or design but they were still really smart about how to make things work.

Every time something like this is found, I think it highlights how little credit we give some ancient people. You have to imagine there were machines they created that were more complex than this that we haven't discovered. There are a lot of people in our current times that couldn't build this even with an entire machine shop at their disposal.