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Poodles!
Ok...no poodles. I've just been reading too much Project Rungay . But! I have decided to do my own sort of reality television commentary. Only, I'll be doing the History Channel's Ancient Discoveries, and The Discovery Channel's Mythbusters. It's a good way to collect plot bunnies for future reference. I have a notebook where I keep wikipedia articles and newspaper clippings for odd little bits of information like this...and this. So this is really what would just go in my notebook, but I thought I would share...
The focal point of this whole episode is the Antikythera mechanism. Antikythera may be one of the best 10 words ever uttered.
We meet with Michael Wright with the London Science Museum who shows us a Sundial Calendar from 500 AD, 600 years older than the Antikythera mechanism, and much simpler. One of my favorite things about this show is meeting with people who figure out how these things used to work, it always makes me wish I'd been better at math and science...I'd easily have dedicated my life to figuring out ancient technology.
The show connects the mechanism with Archimedes, as he's the most famous inventor of the Hellenistic age, and we get a brief segue into the Archimedes screw. We head now to the Alexandria and the Library I would have killed for, where Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Persians. And here's where Archimedes was influenced by someone who's name I can't quite catch. Tychibius? Hesybius? Aha, Ctesibius Thank you wikipedia. This guy could really be called 'Father Time'
Until this point the ancients used water for time, called a clepsydra. But it worked as more of a timer...how long does it take for the water to run out of the pot...than a real timekeeper. Once the water level got low the timer would slow down. And of course, you'd have to fill it up to the top to get going again. He figured out that if he could keep water flow constant. There was a reservoir on top, which fed the actual reservoir and made sure that it was constantly full. Eventually his clocks got so complicated with so much gearwork, that it could also work as a calendar, keeping track of days and....
OMG, it's also a cuckoo clock. Oh come on internet, where is the picture love?
All of his books are gone. But there's one tower that still has his fingerprints. It was believed for a long time to be the Tomb of Socrates, and remained relatively undamaged all this time. It has carvings of the 8 winds, and is now known as the Tower of the Winds. It had a huge water clock based on a Ctesibius design. It let the entire city of Athens tell the time. We know for sure that it could do hours, days and months. But now, some people believe it could also chart the sun and moon in regards to the zodiac...and now we're back to the Antikytherian mechanism.
The first person to take real interest in the mechanism was a man named Derek J. de Solla Price put together a model of how he believed the mechanism would have worked. it showed the movements of the sun and moon and the days of the month in regards to the lunar phases. According to his calculations, this would have been able to calculate movements for 4 years. He believed these might have been commonplace, and basically speaking the 'motherboard' of the tower of the winds. However, and now we're back to Michael Wright, who thought it was even more than that. And he went about building his own.
A lot of people thought (and probably some still do) that the mechanism was either a fake or a modern thing mixed in, because the gears were far too detailed for the age. But he was able to do it with little more than a compass and a file. MacGyver, eat your heart out.
And now we skip over to the Odometer, invented by Archimedes so that each mile of Roman road could be marked. The only concrete thing we have left of it are a few sketches. And based only on the sketches, even Da vinci couldn't make a reproduction. But a man named Sleasewick (now is that a name or what?) was able to figure it out. The reason he could figure it out, and others couldn't, was actually related to the Antikythera mechanism. They all used square teeth for their models, and he used the pointed teeth in the mechanism. He created a cart full of gears. As the wheels turned the gears, they would in turn turn a very large gear with 400 points. Every time that wheel turned it would drop a marble into a box...marking every mile. It is really incredibly cool.
Back to the Antikythera mechanism. This thing was as cool as my astronomy software in college. You could set the date and it would show you the positions of the sun, moon and planets on that date.
And now, at the end of the episode, we are left with the obligatory statement about how much more advanced the ancient peoples were than we thought, and how much cooler we could all be if we hadn't lost this knowledge.
The focal point of this whole episode is the Antikythera mechanism. Antikythera may be one of the best 10 words ever uttered.
We meet with Michael Wright with the London Science Museum who shows us a Sundial Calendar from 500 AD, 600 years older than the Antikythera mechanism, and much simpler. One of my favorite things about this show is meeting with people who figure out how these things used to work, it always makes me wish I'd been better at math and science...I'd easily have dedicated my life to figuring out ancient technology.
The show connects the mechanism with Archimedes, as he's the most famous inventor of the Hellenistic age, and we get a brief segue into the Archimedes screw. We head now to the Alexandria and the Library I would have killed for, where Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Persians. And here's where Archimedes was influenced by someone who's name I can't quite catch. Tychibius? Hesybius? Aha, Ctesibius Thank you wikipedia. This guy could really be called 'Father Time'
Until this point the ancients used water for time, called a clepsydra. But it worked as more of a timer...how long does it take for the water to run out of the pot...than a real timekeeper. Once the water level got low the timer would slow down. And of course, you'd have to fill it up to the top to get going again. He figured out that if he could keep water flow constant. There was a reservoir on top, which fed the actual reservoir and made sure that it was constantly full. Eventually his clocks got so complicated with so much gearwork, that it could also work as a calendar, keeping track of days and....
OMG, it's also a cuckoo clock. Oh come on internet, where is the picture love?
All of his books are gone. But there's one tower that still has his fingerprints. It was believed for a long time to be the Tomb of Socrates, and remained relatively undamaged all this time. It has carvings of the 8 winds, and is now known as the Tower of the Winds. It had a huge water clock based on a Ctesibius design. It let the entire city of Athens tell the time. We know for sure that it could do hours, days and months. But now, some people believe it could also chart the sun and moon in regards to the zodiac...and now we're back to the Antikytherian mechanism.
The first person to take real interest in the mechanism was a man named Derek J. de Solla Price put together a model of how he believed the mechanism would have worked. it showed the movements of the sun and moon and the days of the month in regards to the lunar phases. According to his calculations, this would have been able to calculate movements for 4 years. He believed these might have been commonplace, and basically speaking the 'motherboard' of the tower of the winds. However, and now we're back to Michael Wright, who thought it was even more than that. And he went about building his own.
A lot of people thought (and probably some still do) that the mechanism was either a fake or a modern thing mixed in, because the gears were far too detailed for the age. But he was able to do it with little more than a compass and a file. MacGyver, eat your heart out.
And now we skip over to the Odometer, invented by Archimedes so that each mile of Roman road could be marked. The only concrete thing we have left of it are a few sketches. And based only on the sketches, even Da vinci couldn't make a reproduction. But a man named Sleasewick (now is that a name or what?) was able to figure it out. The reason he could figure it out, and others couldn't, was actually related to the Antikythera mechanism. They all used square teeth for their models, and he used the pointed teeth in the mechanism. He created a cart full of gears. As the wheels turned the gears, they would in turn turn a very large gear with 400 points. Every time that wheel turned it would drop a marble into a box...marking every mile. It is really incredibly cool.
Back to the Antikythera mechanism. This thing was as cool as my astronomy software in college. You could set the date and it would show you the positions of the sun, moon and planets on that date.
And now, at the end of the episode, we are left with the obligatory statement about how much more advanced the ancient peoples were than we thought, and how much cooler we could all be if we hadn't lost this knowledge.