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I finally read up on the Antikythera mechanism and the number 30 keeps blowing my mind
So I fell down a rabbit hole last night about that shipwreck near Antikythera, Greece, and the bronze gear thing they pulled out of it in 1901. It has at least 30 hand cut bronze gears in it, and researchers think it tracked the sun, moon, and probably the planets, which puts it around 2,000 years ahead of anything else like it. I always figured ancient people were smart, but building that with no power tools or precision machining is a whole other level. Does anyone know if there are good books on how they think the gears were actually cut by hand?
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william_garcia13d ago
The line about it being "2,000 years ahead of anything else like it" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People say that because we lost the tech, not because it was magic. The Romans were already making gears for other stuff, and Alexandria had workshops full of skilled metal workers. A hand cut gear isn't some impossible feat if you've got a guy who's been doing bronze work his whole life and a decent set of dividers. We also only have a few crumbled fragments, so the "30 gears tracked the planets" thing is one interpretation, not a fact carved in stone. Chances are it wasn't some lone genius either. It was probably a family trade passed down for a few generations and the knowledge just died out when the workshop did.
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