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Astro-navigation, Solar & Lunar eclipses and the dates of 1/2nd Century BC Olympics, around the Mediterranean.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jul/30/archaeology.astronomy

Ancient Greek 'computer' displayed Olympics calendar

guardian.co.uk, Ian Sample, July 30 2008

An ancient Greek "computer" used to calculate the movements of the sun, moon and planets has been linked to Archimedes after scientists deciphered previously hidden inscriptions on the device.

X-ray images of the bronze mechanism, which was recovered from a shipwreck more than a century ago, also revealed a sporting calendar that displays the cycle of the prestigious "crown" games, including the Olympics, which were held every four years.

Corroded remains of the device were found in 1901 by spongedivers, who happened upon the shipwreck of a Roman merchant vessel while sheltering from a storm near the tiny Greek island of Antikythera. The ship, which was laden with treasures from the Greek world including bronze statues, pottery and glassware, is believed to have met its fate in the notoriously dangerous stretch of water en route to Italy.

The remarkably complex machine has been dated to around 150 BC, but it has puzzled researchers who have spent decades examining its 80 or so corroded fragments in the hope of learning how it worked and perhaps even who made it.

The device is thought to be the earliest known mechanism to use geared wheels, a feat of engineering that was not to reappear for at least another thousand years in the astronomical clocks of medieval Europe.

Writing in the latest issue of the journal Nature, researchers from Britain and the US describe how they used three-dimensional X-ray imaging to decipher previously unnoticed inscriptions on the back of the device, which was enclosed in a wooden casing the size of a large dictionary.

The images revealed the names of the different months, which were used only in certain parts of north western Greece and Sicily. Intriguingly, it is the same calendar that would have been used in Syracuse, the Sicilian city and home to the great mathematician Archimedes, who is known from ancient texts to have built astronomical machines.

"We know Archimedes did mechanical astronomy here 100 years earlier and this could be from his home city, it could have been inspired by his work, or it could have been a local tradition that he started," said Alexander Jones from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, who examined the fragments with British researchers John Steele and Tony Freeth.

The mechanism is likely to have survived only through the good fortune of being aboard the ill-fated vessel, since bronze and other metals at the time were frequently melted down to make other objects when they fell into disrepair or were no longer needed.

"There must have been an unbroken tradition of craftsmen doing this kind of work, but they didn't write it down in books for the most part, they were teaching through workshops and appreticeships, so we're not going to get much other evidence," Jones added.

Further images of the mechanism revealed a previously unknown sporting calendar that marked the times of the Olympiad cycle, naming the prominent Nemean, Isthmian, Pythian and Olympic games. The events were so popular that truces were often called in times of war to allow people safe passage to attend them.

The unexpected discovery of the sporting calendar suggests the device was more than a mere tool for teaching and popularising the workings of the cosmos. "The machine as a whole was not just showing high science, showing astronomy, but was linking science to the cultural cycles of the Greeks," said Jones.

The machine, which was probably driven by a hand-operated crank, used a collection of inter-meshing gears to calculate the positions of the sun and moon, the dates of eclipses, and possibly the positions of the five planets known about at the time. "Our idea of what ancient astronomy was doing at the time is very much a patchwork of fragmentary bits of evidence that start fitting together when we relate them to this," said Jones.

Watch a video explaining the latest research into the Antikythera mechanism.
 
Similar story from the beeb:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7533457.stm
The device's "subsidiary dial" was once thought to be a 76-year "callippic" calendar.

However, Mr Freeth and his colleagues have now been able to establish from its inscriptions that it displays the 4-year Olympiad cycle.

Instead of one Olympics as there is today, the ancient Olympiads, called the Panhellenic Games, comprised four games spread over four years.

The four sectors of the dial are inscribed with a year number and two Panhellenic Games: the "crown" games of Isthmia, Olympia, Nemea and Pythia; and two lesser games: Naa (held at Dodona) and a second game which has not yet been deciphered.

In addition, the team was able to identify the names of all 12 months, which belong to the Corinthian family of months.

Corinth, in central Greece, established colonies in north-western Greece, Corfu and Sicily, where Archimedes was established.
 
This should be of interest here (doesn't seem worth a new thread):

Unique medieval astrolabe saved by the British Museum
A medieval astrolabe found buried in the ground has been saved for the nation thanks to a £350,000 purchase by the British Museum.
By Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent
Last Updated: 5:35PM BST 30 Jul 2008

The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant, thought to date from 1388, is the only one of its kind definitely made in England.

Astrolabes are sophisticated calculation instruments that enable their users to tell the time and determine their geographical latitude using the position of the sun and stars.

They were developed by Islamic mathematicians in the early Middle Ages before being adopted by Europeans.

The British Museum was originally outbid in an auction last year for the brass device but succeeded in having an export ban imposed on the instrument, one of only eight such instruments to have survived from the Middle Ages. It was found in an archeological dig of the House of St Agnes in Canterbury in 2005.

Now it has acquired the astrolabe thanks to £175,00 from the British Museum Friends, plus grants of £125,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and £50,000 from The Art Fund.

Thanking them for their help, Andrew Burnett, deputy director of the British Museum, said: "It is wonderful that we have been able to acquire this unique object.

"The quadrant will be a very important addition to our medieval collection as an object which can explain the sophistication of science in the Middle Ages and the transfer of knowledge between Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities."

The astrolabe quadrant will go on display in the museum in August, and will take centre stage in its new medieval gallery, 'Europe 1000 - 1500' when it opens in 2009.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... useum.html
 
Review of a new book about the Antikythera.

Book Review: Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant
Antikythera

Imagine if Howard Carter had opened Tutankhamen's tomb and found an internal combustion engine inside. That's the sort of surprise scholars received when they realised what had been hauled up from a Mediterranean shipwreck in 1901 and left in a cigar box in the storeroom of a Greek museum.

Amongst the treasures of one of the richest hauls of ancient Greek statues ever found was what appeared to be a corroded lump of bronze. It turned out to be an intricately constructed mechanical device, an analogue computer, the world's oldest surviving machine.

The Antikythera mechanism, as it became known, was more than 2000 years old. As New Scientist's own Jo Marchant explains in Decoding the Heavens, it would be at least 1000 years before anything of similar complexity came along.

Who could have built such a machine? What was it for? Why was the technology lost? Far from being a hunk of junk, this was the most important artefact yet found from ancient Greece.

Marchant answers these questions, and blends the story of the Antikythera mechanism, the people bewitched by it, the 100-year race to understand it, with the history, chemistry, archaeology, astronomy, engineering behind it. The account is sprinkled with the magic dust of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Many of the characters we meet along the way, Marchant tells us, are infected with the Antikythera bug, and it's clear that she has been too.

Arthur C Clarke – who endorsed this book before he died – was an early victim of the Antikythera bug. Clarke bemoaned the fact that its secrets had been lost. If only they hadn't, he said, the Industrial Revolution might have started more than 1000 years ago. By now, he said, "We would not merely be pottering around on the Moon. We would have reached the nearer stars."

Decoding the Heavens: Solving the mystery of the world's first computer, by Jo Marchant, is published by William Heinemann

Related Articles

Enigmatic relic was an eclipse calculator
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10680
29 November 2006

Weblinks

Decoding the Heavens
http://www.decodingtheheavens.com
 
It was A C Clarke who said it should be Athens museums prime exibit instead of being hid in a side room.

But thats our view of things, we like computers

How would the ancient Greeks have liked to be remembered?

Another interesting aspect of this find that we often forget was that it was the worlds first underwater excavation.
 
Full text of article at link.

Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer
Antikythera

MARCELLUS and his men blockaded Syracuse, in Sicily, for two years. The Roman general expected to conquer the Greek city state easily, but the ingenious siege towers and catapults designed by Archimedes helped to keep his troops at bay.

Then, in 212 BC, the Syracusans neglected their defences during a festival to the goddess Artemis, and the Romans finally breached the city walls. Marcellus wanted Archimedes alive, but it wasn't to be. According to ancient historians, Archimedes was killed in the chaos; by one account a soldier ran him through with a sword as he was in the middle of a mathematical proof.

One of Archimedes's creations was saved, though. The general took back to Rome a mechanical bronze sphere that showed the motions of the sun, moon and planets as seen from Earth.

The sphere stayed in Marcellus's family for generations, until the Roman author Cicero saw it in the first century BC. "The invention of Archimedes deserves special admiration because he had thought out a way to represent accurately by a single device for turning the globe those various and divergent movements with their different rates of speed," he wrote. "The moon was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind it in the sky."

Until recently, historians paid scant attention to this story: the description suggests a sophisticated mechanical device, beyond anything the ancient Greeks were thought to have been capable of. Furthermore, Cicero had no technical training, and did not explain how the device worked. He could have made the story up for effect.

Now, however, research on the battered remains of a mysterious ancient device suggests that Cicero was telling the truth. While the Antikythera mechanism is not the same one seen by Cicero - it was not made until a century later - it proves that clockwork mechanisms like the one he described really did exist, and that ancient Greek technology was far more advanced than thought. Freshly deciphered inscriptions on its dials also hint at the origins of this technology.
 
ProfessorF said:
That's wonderful!

And a wonderful example, too, of an eccentric English scientist, beavering away in his rather low-tech workshop. 8)


(Did you notice my use of the word eccentric there?
I think Stephen Fry would have approved... ;) )
 
rynner2 said:
And a wonderful example, too, of an eccentric English scientist, beavering away in his rather low-tech workshop. 8)

:D
Indeed. The world owes much to a man in his shed.
 
Images & vid at article link.

Ancient Greek calculating device continues to reveal secrets
April 4th, 2011 in Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-anc ... crets.html

Main Antikythera mechanism fragment. The mechanism consists of a complex system of 32 wheels and plates with inscriptions relating to the signs of the zodiac and the months. Image: National Archaeological Museum, Athens, No. 15987.

(PhysOrg.com) -- It's known as the Antikythera mechanism, a metal gear driven device found over a century ago on a sunken Roman ship, near the island of Antikythera, that for just as many years has had scientists analyzing, scratching their heads and offering suggestions as to its purpose.

Some have called the device the first analog computer; others the first mechanical computing device. Either way, the device very clearly demonstrates that the Greeks of 150 to 100 BCE knew far more about gears and calculating machines than had been thought possible just a decade or so ago.

After careful analysis with an x-ray tomography machine which allowed the device to be seen as a series of slices that could then be used to see all the way through the mechanism slice by slice (as is done with the same machine when analyzing organs inside a living human being) researchers, particularly Michael Wright, now of Imperial College, London, have come to believe they have almost a full understanding of what the machines was built to do; and that, was to calculate the position of celestial bodies.

Wright has even built (completed in 2006) what he believes to be an almost exact replica of the device.

This video is not supported by your browser at this time.

If modern research is correct, the device worked by hand cranking a main dial to display a chosen date, causing the wheels and gears inside to display (via tabs on separate dials) the position of the sun, moon, and the five known planets at that time, for that date; a mechanical and technical feat that would not be seen again until the fourteenth century in Europe with precision clocks.

Also, some of the early research showed that the device actually used special gears to account for the elliptical shape of the moon’s orbit to account for what appeared to be a speed up and slow down as the moon moved around the Earth.

Now James Evans and his colleagues at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State, have shown that instead of trying to use the same kind of gear mechanism to account for the elliptical path the Earth takes around the sun, and subsequent apparent changes in speed, the inventor of the device may have taken a different tack, and that was to stretch or distort the zodiac on the dial face to change the width of the spaces on the face to make up for the slightly different amount of time that is represented as the hand moves around the face.

In a paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, Evans describes how he and his team were able to examine x-rays taken of the corroded machine (69 then later 88 degrees of the circle) and discovered that the two circles that were used to represent the Zodiac and Egyptian calendar respectively, did indeed differ just enough to account for what appeared to be the irregular movement during different parts of the year.

Though not all experts agree on the findings, this new evidence does appear to suggest that an attempt was made by the early inventor to take into account the elliptical nature of the Earth orbiting the sun, no small thing.

Some have attributed the technical anomaly of the existence of the Antikythera mechanism, to visitation by aliens, others have suggested it wasn’t the Greeks at all that came up with the technology, but the ancient Babylonians, who passed on the gains they had made in not just mechanical engineering, but math and astronomy as well. Either way, it’s clear that early civilizations came to know and understand much more about the world around them then modern society has given them credit for and as our own understanding of the sciences grows, we come to see that it’s quite possible that a lot of the things we take for granted as inventions of the modern era, are simply recreations of work done by our forebears.

More information:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... mechanism/
 
Next Thursday on BBC4:

The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer

In 1901, a group of divers excavating an ancient Roman shipwreck near the island of Antikythera, off the southern coast of Greece, found a mysterious object - a lump of calcified stone that contained within it several gearwheels welded together after years under the sea. The 2,000-year-old object, no bigger than a modern laptop, is now regarded as the world's oldest computer, devised to predict solar eclipses and, according to recent findings, calculate the timing of the ancient Olympics. Following the efforts of an international team of scientists, the mysteries of the Antikythera Mechanism are uncovered, revealing surprising and awe-inspiring details of the object that continues to mystify.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hlkcq
 
Watching that video - what is it that makes it a computer, and not an orrery?

Edit (in the same way that Babbage's Difference Engine wasn't a computer, as it could only do one specific task, as defined by the shapes and sizes of all the cogs - but his Analytical Engine, had he finished the design, would have been a programmable computer in almost the modern sense)
 
Me too, its no more a computer than my grandmothers clock.

a computer is a programmable machine.

A punchcard operated loom, perhaps, or Babbages machine
 
James_H2 said:
Watching that video - what is it that makes it a computer, and not an orrery?
Why do you think an orrery is not a computer? ;)

It predicts future positions of the planets, provided you start it off with accurate representations of present positions (or 'inputs' for short!)

Konduru said "..its no more a computer than my grandmothers clock"

I hope you still have that clock! It must be worth a fortune if it really can predict solar and lunar eclipses, and even the movement of the Earth's shadow over the moon's face in a lunar eclipse!

The difference between a clock and the Antikythera Mechanism is that clocks just repeat simple, regular cycles of hours, minutes and seconds ad infinitum, while the A.M. can predict the complex and exceedingly irregular movements of the heavenly bodies, allowing for ellipticity of orbits, etc. Something that, even after Newton's Theory of Gravity came along, would have taken a huge amount of work with pencil and paper to achieve.

So I'm happy to call the A.M. the earliest (known) computer. :D
 
Rynners post above illustrates the necessiy for a Like button.

A tour de force sir!
 
rynner2 said:
The difference between a clock and the Antikythera Mechanism is that clocks just repeat simple, regular cycles of hours, minutes and seconds ad infinitum, while the A.M. can predict the complex and exceedingly irregular movements of the heavenly bodies, allowing for ellipticity of orbits, etc. Something that, even after Newton's Theory of Gravity came along, would have taken a huge amount of work with pencil and paper to achieve.

So I'm happy to call the A.M. the earliest (known) computer. :D
Entirely for the sake of argument :D :

No, that makes the Antikythera Mechanism a clock with more gears and dials, not a computer. A complex clock no doubt, but a clock nonetheless. Predicting heavenly bodies motions is a rather normal clock function:
clock978303.jpg
and
22864-070340_295px.jpg
 
After watching this rather excellent BBC four programme, i'm inclined to think it was a computer where the gear concept was later simplified for clocks.

The number of teeth relating to prime numbers and the pins that were used within the cogs to emulate the eccentric orbits of the moon and other planets would suggest that a lot of trial and error must have been done to get the calcualtions and the mechanism right.

So where did these test pieces end up?
 
Clocks, if anything, seem to be a spin-off of the Mechanism. Or, at least, a cheapo half-remembered attempt at it. It seems that it's another one of those things that gets invented, gets sort-of forgotten, and is later reinvented in a similar but different form.

As to where the Mechanism's prototypes went - it suggests that there have been, and always were, evolutionary stages that were lost in time. I imagine the same thing would happen to current technological pieces. After all, it's already more and more difficult to find working older versions of such things (i.e. TVs, radios etc).
 
Monstrosa said:
A computer is a person who computes.
Yeah?

Tell that to all those magazines out there with 'computers' or 'computing' in the title! ;)
 
Jerry_B said:
...

As to where the Mechanism's prototypes went - it suggests that there have been, and always were, evolutionary stages that were lost in time. I imagine the same thing would happen to current technological pieces. After all, it's already more and more difficult to find working older versions of such things (i.e. TVs, radios etc).
If, by some chance, they ever find another, earlier version (perhaps in some ancient Egyptian, or Macedonian, tomb) and it turns out to be even more sophisticated. That would be interesting.

As it is, we only have one and so far, it stands alone as a total and mystifying, surprise. :)
 
The way I'd see it is: a clock is a machine which computes and outputs one particular algorithm, mechanically

The Antikythera mechanism is a machine that computes and outputs a more complex - but still specific - set of algorithms

A computer is general purpose:
A computer is a programmable machine designed to automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem.

(from Wikipedia)
 
rynner2 said:
Monstrosa said:
A computer is a person who computes.
Yeah?

Tell that to all those magazines out there with 'computers' or 'computing' in the title! ;)

Ha ha!

Actually, Monstrosa is right (kinda). Before electronic computers were invented, savants who could perform amazing calculations in their heads were employed as 'computers'.

But you knew that. :)
 
To the extent that you sometimes read old SF stories talking about computers, and it turns out they're talking about people whose job is to make calculations.
 
The mechanism was discovered / recovered during 1900 - 1901.

The use of the term 'computer' to mean 'a person who performs calculations' dates back at least as far as the 1600's.

The OED indicates that by the end of the 19th century 'computer' was used to mean 'a machine or mechanical means for performing calculation'.

The currently common meaning dates back only as far as the mid-1940's.

Derek de Solla Price used the term 'computer' in the titles of both his seminal analytical papers on the device (1959; 1974), so he might well be considered the source of the 'computer' attribution. However, it bears pointing out that he got his (first) Ph.D. in the mid-1940's (when 'computer' began emerging in its current sense). As such, his allusions to the mechanism as a 'computer' quite probably alluded to the prior sense of any (mechanical) device that 'calculates'.
 
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