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How the Antikythera Mechanism Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
0:13
Speaker 1: just Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So this is the stuff
0:16
Speaker 1: you should know the podcast. Yes, indeed, Um, you know,
0:23
Speaker 1: archaeology was the first word, first big word I could
0:26
Speaker 1: spell early, because like two weeks old when you're spelling archaeology. Yeah,
0:32
Speaker 1: I couldn't spell anything else for years and years, but
0:35
Speaker 1: I could spell archaeology. I love archaeology. Yeah, me too.
0:38
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite things actually too, although I
0:42
Speaker 1: didn't list that when I was asked what my favorite
0:43
Speaker 1: things were in that one listener mail, and still it's
0:46
Speaker 1: up there. Um, but you too, huh oh yeah, starting
0:52
Speaker 1: with uh, well, starting with Indiana Jones. Yeah, that definitely
0:56
Speaker 1: helps that that we were alive and at the right
0:59
Speaker 1: age when those came out. Um, well, Chuck, there's a ship.
1:04
Speaker 1: It's an unnamed ship as far as I know, that
1:07
Speaker 1: went down in the g and c off the coast
1:10
Speaker 1: of a tiny, teeny little spit of land called Anti
1:15
Speaker 1: Cathera in Greece, in between Crete and the Greek mainland,
1:18
Speaker 1: I believe, and um in nineteen o one or nine
1:22
Speaker 1: hundred it was discovered and it actually ended up giving
1:25
Speaker 1: birth to the field of um marine archaeology. Actually it
1:29
Speaker 1: was the first shipwreck that was ever excavated archaeologically. Yeah,
1:34
Speaker 1: I think I wrote an article on that way back
1:36
Speaker 1: in the day. Underwater archaeology. It's a very tricky, I
1:41
Speaker 1: would imagine, so because most of the stuff you find
1:44
Speaker 1: is falling apart, Like the second you take it out
1:47
Speaker 1: of water, it starts falling apart. Right, So they've gotten
1:50
Speaker 1: really good now and imagine they were not as good
1:52
Speaker 1: about it in nineteen hundreds about bringing stuff up still
1:55
Speaker 1: in water, yeah, and transporting in water, same sea water,
2:00
Speaker 1: display it in water to uh well know then they
2:03
Speaker 1: start poking around in yeah, right water. Yeah, with the water.
2:10
Speaker 1: It's pretty sensible. Um I could have come up with that,
2:15
Speaker 1: I think with that method. Yeah, good for you. Um well,
2:21
Speaker 1: So okay, anyway, this shipwreck that was discovered in discovered
2:25
Speaker 1: actually by accident, right. Yeah. There was some sponge divers.
2:30
Speaker 1: You know, sponge diving. It's a big deal. Apparently it
2:34
Speaker 1: wasn't Greece. It was. That's where you had to get
2:37
Speaker 1: sponges back in the day. Uh is in the ocean,
2:41
Speaker 1: and they were the sponge divers who they actually got
2:44
Speaker 1: blown off course by a bad storm and ended up
2:46
Speaker 1: in that lovely part of town, and they said, boy,
2:50
Speaker 1: this is great, let's just dive here. One guy dove down,
2:54
Speaker 1: came back up and there. They weren't free diving at
2:56
Speaker 1: this point, and actually had you can listen to her well,
2:58
Speaker 1: it wasn't a diving bell, but underwater breathing apparatus is.
3:02
Speaker 1: At this point. He came back and he's like, oh
3:05
Speaker 1: my god, they're dead horses and dead men everywhere. Yeah,
3:10
Speaker 1: and the boss is like, I don't know about that.
3:12
Speaker 1: Let me go dive down there. He dives down and
3:15
Speaker 1: comes up with a bronze hand and says, you big dummy.
3:18
Speaker 1: They smacked the guy over the head with it. It's
3:20
Speaker 1: a statue, a bunch of statues down there decomposing. And
3:24
Speaker 1: then he went, wait, why are there a bunch of
3:26
Speaker 1: statues down there? And they they said, well, let's figure out,
3:31
Speaker 1: let's remember where the spot is and we'll just head
3:33
Speaker 1: off to North Africa and do our sponge diving like
3:35
Speaker 1: we were going to initially. Yeah, they still have to
3:37
Speaker 1: make some dough, right, But when they came back, they
3:39
Speaker 1: took the bronze arm and the location of the ship
3:43
Speaker 1: to the Greek government. And the Greek government said, you
3:46
Speaker 1: know what, this could be a big deal. We have
3:50
Speaker 1: a lot of antiquities out there under the sea and
3:53
Speaker 1: this might be some sort of treasure troups. So they
3:56
Speaker 1: hired these sponge divers to go back and excavate this place,
4:00
Speaker 1: and they found some pretty amazing stuff. In addition to
4:02
Speaker 1: the bronze arm, they found all sorts of marble statues. Um.
4:07
Speaker 1: They found a bronze statue of a young athlete. I
4:11
Speaker 1: think it was like six ft tall, a little bigger
4:13
Speaker 1: than life is what they call it. Um they found
4:16
Speaker 1: a bust of a cynic, a philosopher, a very detailed
4:20
Speaker 1: lifelike bust that's really neat. And um that was the
4:23
Speaker 1: guy whose arm. That was his arm, Oh, it was
4:26
Speaker 1: his arm. Okay. Um. And they found all manner of stuff,
4:30
Speaker 1: some really cool stuff and brought it up and they
4:33
Speaker 1: displayed it in the museum. And among this trove, um
4:36
Speaker 1: there was a greatly overlooked item item number one five
4:40
Speaker 1: zero eight seven. And um, it was this weird kind
4:45
Speaker 1: of it looked almost like a kind of a clock
4:47
Speaker 1: face in a wooden frame and no one knew what
4:51
Speaker 1: it was, and compared to the amazing art that had
4:55
Speaker 1: been brought up, it looked like a pile of garbage basically,
4:59
Speaker 1: So they just piled it away um and it languished
5:02
Speaker 1: for a while until it was um kind of rediscovered again. Yeah,
5:07
Speaker 1: and giving credit where credit is due. The Sponge Team captain,
5:12
Speaker 1: I think that's what they called themselves. He was captain, Yeah,
5:16
Speaker 1: Sponge Team Captain, Demetrius Kantos. And then the cry baby
5:22
Speaker 1: who dove down there and thought he saw dead people
5:25
Speaker 1: was Elias Stadiatus. And if there's one thing I love,
5:29
Speaker 1: it's Greek names. Love the names. Do you like those
5:35
Speaker 1: as much as archaeology? Greek archaeologists that you're pretty much
5:40
Speaker 1: flying in the upper atmosphere for me. Uh So those
5:44
Speaker 1: were the dudes that led the Sponge team, and all
5:46
Speaker 1: those antiquities, they're scattered about a little bit, but most
5:49
Speaker 1: of them are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece.
5:53
Speaker 1: Uh and also some in Switzerland, oddly enough, and then
5:57
Speaker 1: some more in a different museum of underwater antiquity in Greece.
6:00
Speaker 1: And the reason the Greeks went to this trouble and
6:03
Speaker 1: didn't just say whatever. Who cares about a bronze arm.
6:07
Speaker 1: Apparently they'd been defeated recently by the Ottoman Turks within
6:11
Speaker 1: the last few years, and we're looking for a way
6:14
Speaker 1: to restore some national pride. And what better way to
6:17
Speaker 1: restore national pride than raising two thousand year old statues
6:21
Speaker 1: of your you know, ancient gods that were made by
6:24
Speaker 1: your predecessors. And not only statues, but um, lamps and
6:29
Speaker 1: bowls and utensils and tools and just all sorts of stuff.
6:33
Speaker 1: It was a treasure trove. Yeah. So, um, this this
6:35
Speaker 1: site still is basically intact. Um. It's a it's the
6:41
Speaker 1: shipwreck is over Um a couple of I think about
6:45
Speaker 1: three d foot span, about the length of a football field.
6:48
Speaker 1: And there's actually for a long time they thought it
6:50
Speaker 1: was two ships, but they think actually no, it was
6:53
Speaker 1: an enormous, massive ship that broke into two and is
6:58
Speaker 1: um they've only just found the front. They found like
7:00
Speaker 1: the cabin, they haven't even found the hold. And that
7:03
Speaker 1: it was a huge grain ship that had been converted
7:05
Speaker 1: to basically a treasure ship that was taking Greek antiquities
7:10
Speaker 1: to Rome around sixty b c. E um. And it's sunk.
7:15
Speaker 1: So they there's all these treasures that they haven't even
7:17
Speaker 1: found yet. They dove on it in nineteen hundred and one,
7:21
Speaker 1: Jacques Cousteau hit it up in nineteen fifty and then
7:24
Speaker 1: again in nineteen and now there's the most sophisticated dives
7:28
Speaker 1: that are being taken on it. Yes, he's on it UM.
7:33
Speaker 1: As of two thousand and fourteen, there's an international team
7:36
Speaker 1: that includes some people from Woods Hole Geographic Institute or
7:39
Speaker 1: Oceanographic Institute UM who are really starting to figure this out. Yeah,
7:46
Speaker 1: and you know, one of the reasons you're still doing
7:48
Speaker 1: this is because, like you said, it's just a great
7:50
Speaker 1: find no matter what. But the other reason is because
7:53
Speaker 1: item number one zero eight seven a k A. The
7:58
Speaker 1: h how's that pronounced again? Annikathera anacathera mechanism is UM
8:03
Speaker 1: one of the most mysterious finds ever because nobody knows
8:07
Speaker 1: who made it. Uh and until recently no one knew
8:10
Speaker 1: exactly what it was. But now they pretty much figured
8:13
Speaker 1: it out. Yeah. Well, so when they when they first
8:15
Speaker 1: brought it up in N one UM again, it just
8:20
Speaker 1: looked like some weird kind of kind of like a clock,
8:23
Speaker 1: but it was in a wooden frame as the wooden
8:25
Speaker 1: frame was exposed to the air, it's it split and
8:30
Speaker 1: the stuff inside fell apart. And when it fell apart,
8:34
Speaker 1: one of the directors of the museum, I believe spirit
8:38
Speaker 1: On Stais another great name. Um, he looked inside and
8:42
Speaker 1: realized that these are all like actually different bronze parts,
8:45
Speaker 1: and they have inscriptions and they appear to be geared
8:48
Speaker 1: teeth like precision gears. Right, Except that's impossible because that
8:54
Speaker 1: technology didn't come along for well over a thousand years later, yes,
8:59
Speaker 1: a thousand plus, like maybe fourteen hundred, two thousand years later, right,
9:03
Speaker 1: So it pops up in the west about the fourteenth
9:07
Speaker 1: century in Europe. So yeah, like you say, it's totally
9:10
Speaker 1: impossible that this could be what what he's looking at,
9:14
Speaker 1: not fifty or a hundred years. So some people said, Um,
9:17
Speaker 1: this thing probably accidentally was dropped over this wreck site
9:21
Speaker 1: and just happened to nestle in and make it seem
9:24
Speaker 1: like it was part of this ancient shipwreck. Nope, No,
9:27
Speaker 1: it was found underneath other debris in the shipwreck. So
9:30
Speaker 1: that's virtually impossible. But it was so confounding, and it's
9:33
Speaker 1: so completely undermined our understanding at the time of technology
9:40
Speaker 1: like that and just the understanding of that kind of
9:43
Speaker 1: precision engineering. Um that it was just set aside, like
9:47
Speaker 1: no one knows what this says. Let's just pretend it
9:49
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. Yeah. Uh, and that happened until about the
9:53
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. And uh, we'll take a little break here
9:56
Speaker 1: and we'll get back to what happened in the nineteen
9:58
Speaker 1: fifties right after this. Alright, so it's nineteen fifties. Everyone's
10:17
Speaker 1: drunk at lunch, smoking cigarette, throwing trash out of their window, right,
10:21
Speaker 1: and there's an impossible machine rotting away in a museum
10:26
Speaker 1: in Greece, that's right. And that's when a man named
10:29
Speaker 1: Derek Dislo Price. Uh so, you know what, this thing
10:33
Speaker 1: is pretty neat and I think I'm gonna make this
10:35
Speaker 1: my new obsession. So he spent years researching this thing
10:40
Speaker 1: and basically said, I think it's some sort of weird
10:44
Speaker 1: Uh he said computer. He meant, well, he didn't mean computer,
10:48
Speaker 1: because it can't be a computer. Obviously it's not programmable now,
10:54
Speaker 1: so it can't be a computer. But it's I mean
10:57
Speaker 1: that words not terribly far off off. Yeah, it's not
11:02
Speaker 1: a computer. So he's using the wrong word there. But
11:04
Speaker 1: along with Dr c uh Man another great Greek name
11:09
Speaker 1: Kara Kallos, he's a radiographer. He said, let's take some
11:13
Speaker 1: X rays of this thing. In the nineteen seventy four
11:15
Speaker 1: he published as Findings in Gears from the Greeks, which
11:19
Speaker 1: he thought was gonna light the world on fire. But
11:22
Speaker 1: it turns out people were a little scared, uh to say, Yeah,
11:27
Speaker 1: this thing is predates these kind of precision gears by
11:30
Speaker 1: well over a thousand years, So let's rethink everything we
11:33
Speaker 1: know about this kind of technology. Everyone, No one wanted
11:37
Speaker 1: to touch it with the tin footpole, is what I gathered.
11:40
Speaker 1: It was kind of ignored the at the time. The
11:42
Speaker 1: people who were studying ancient Greece were studying their written documents, right,
11:47
Speaker 1: they weren't studying like artifacts, like physical relics or anything
11:51
Speaker 1: like that, and they certainly weren't really up on the
11:54
Speaker 1: ancient Greek technology technology. Um. And so yeah, he wrote
11:59
Speaker 1: this this book and just expected it to change the
12:02
Speaker 1: world because he really had approached it from a very
12:05
Speaker 1: scientific standpoint. When they finally released his book in the seventies, right,
12:09
Speaker 1: his theory on what it was was correct. Yeah, he
12:12
Speaker 1: theorized that It was a I'm going to use the
12:15
Speaker 1: word computer alright, a mechanism. It was a mechanism with
12:21
Speaker 1: UM at one point up to seventy two different precise gears,
12:25
Speaker 1: two gears that all interacted with one another to track
12:29
Speaker 1: the movement of the celestial bodies, the five planets that
12:34
Speaker 1: were visible to the naked eye, the Sun, the Moon,
12:38
Speaker 1: It tracked eclipses solar and lunar um. And it also
12:44
Speaker 1: um it tracked the Olympic Games just as an added bonus. Well,
12:49
Speaker 1: if you're gonna have a astronomical calculator, you might as
12:53
Speaker 1: well throw in a sports calendar. Yeah, you know, might
12:57
Speaker 1: as well. Uh, and so the whole thing again, this
13:01
Speaker 1: thing should not have existed, like it wasn't for another
13:04
Speaker 1: four years before anything like this appeared in the West. Um.
13:10
Speaker 1: So it shouldn't have been which was another reason why
13:13
Speaker 1: a lot of people weren't like, yes, this is a
13:16
Speaker 1: great book Gears from the Greeks. It changed everything. They
13:20
Speaker 1: were like, you're totally full of it. And this poor guy,
13:23
Speaker 1: Um Price was not helped at all by a guy
13:27
Speaker 1: named Eric van Danikin right. Yeah, he wrote a book
13:30
Speaker 1: in uh nineteen sixty eight called Chariots of the Gods,
13:35
Speaker 1: and in that he proposed that, um, there are aliens
13:38
Speaker 1: who have been bringing us technological gifts to Earth and
13:42
Speaker 1: this is one of them. And everyone this was a
13:45
Speaker 1: really popular book, so he got all the headlines with
13:49
Speaker 1: just a completely fabricated story. Yeah, it was like it
13:52
Speaker 1: was the birth of the interest in ufology and the
13:55
Speaker 1: Bermuda Triangle. The Naski lines are um landing strips, that
14:01
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Right, So when this guy came along
14:04
Speaker 1: and put his stamp of um nuttiness, I guess if
14:10
Speaker 1: certainly interesting. That whole Time Life Mysteries series definitely came
14:14
Speaker 1: out of this von Dannikin's work kind of thing, but
14:19
Speaker 1: it had nothing to do with any kind of academy
14:21
Speaker 1: or scholarliness, right, so he really helped put the kai
14:25
Speaker 1: bosh on Price's work. This gears from the Greeks, and
14:30
Speaker 1: it languished for a while, um for another couple of decades,
14:35
Speaker 1: I believe, right, Yeah, that's right. It wasn't until the
14:37
Speaker 1: mid two thousand's that they decided, you know what, we
14:41
Speaker 1: had this great technology now called CT scanning, computed UH tomography,
14:47
Speaker 1: and what we can do with this stuff? We can
14:49
Speaker 1: actually get inside this thing. And there are videos of
14:53
Speaker 1: this actually being done on the mechanism. It's really cool looking.
14:56
Speaker 1: You can like watch it unfold in real time. And
14:59
Speaker 1: they basedly figured out from the inside out how this
15:02
Speaker 1: thing worked and how it operated. And it is as follows.
15:07
Speaker 1: There's a picture like a a wooden box about the
15:11
Speaker 1: size of a shoe box. Right, Yeah, it looks bigger
15:14
Speaker 1: to me, but I guess um I saw someone else
15:16
Speaker 1: to describe it like a thick laptop size. Okay, again
15:20
Speaker 1: with the computers, people just can't stop. It's the computer,
15:23
Speaker 1: an ancient computer. On one side of the box, if
15:27
Speaker 1: if it's standing like a shoe box on end. On
15:29
Speaker 1: one side, there's a crank like just a small dial
15:32
Speaker 1: with a little handle they would used to crank this
15:35
Speaker 1: thing up. The handles missing. Now, by the way, this
15:37
Speaker 1: is what you're describing is what it looked like originally. Right.
15:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Now it's just disintegrated blobs and chunks of things. Yeah.
15:46
Speaker 1: So the knob on the side is what wound it
15:48
Speaker 1: forward and backward. And uh, then you had a big
15:53
Speaker 1: front side and a backside. All the gears are in
15:57
Speaker 1: the middle contained their end. Yes, and again these are
16:00
Speaker 1: gears with teeth between fifteen and twenty three of them
16:05
Speaker 1: on a gear, and all of them. The number of
16:08
Speaker 1: teeth that they have has to do with their relationship
16:10
Speaker 1: to the other gears they interact with, that's right. So
16:13
Speaker 1: they have all these different hands. If you wound it up,
16:15
Speaker 1: it would engage these gears. Uh. Each of the hands
16:19
Speaker 1: moves at a separate pace and represents what you said earlier,
16:21
Speaker 1: the five planets and Earth in the moon basically Sun
16:26
Speaker 1: and Sun and moon basically anything we can see from
16:28
Speaker 1: Earth at this point, right, And these are the gears inside,
16:31
Speaker 1: and the gears are physically representing how the say, the
16:35
Speaker 1: Sun and the Moon interact. Well, now these are the hands, right,
16:39
Speaker 1: but then they're driving the hands, and the hands have
16:41
Speaker 1: a representation in the form of a colored orb on
16:44
Speaker 1: the face of the actual mechanism the machine exactly. So
16:47
Speaker 1: on the back side, you've got two more dial systems. UH.
16:51
Speaker 1: One is a calendar of the lunar and solar eclipse,
16:54
Speaker 1: and another one UM, basically, like you said, was the
16:58
Speaker 1: sports calendar. The Olympics are coming up than four years
17:02
Speaker 1: after that, there'll be more Olympics, so four years. So
17:06
Speaker 1: on the front, it was at tracked the day right.
17:09
Speaker 1: That was the big the big front face of it.
17:13
Speaker 1: I believe it did. Um. And then on the back
17:15
Speaker 1: when it's when it's tracking eclipses um that that actually
17:20
Speaker 1: so chuck. When you make a clock, the whole purpose
17:23
Speaker 1: of a clock is so any guy can come along
17:26
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, it's this day right. So you
17:29
Speaker 1: want your clock to be accurate. The problem is if
17:31
Speaker 1: you're tracking just the solar calendar, you're tracking just the
17:35
Speaker 1: movement of the moon, your clock is going to or
17:38
Speaker 1: your calendar is eventually going to fall out a sink
17:42
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, something like one of the
17:44
Speaker 1: solstic says, your summer solstice is gonna show up in
17:47
Speaker 1: December after eighteen years, right. So to do that, and
17:52
Speaker 1: this has been like one of the big things that
17:54
Speaker 1: clockmakers and calendar makers have had to deal with forever.
17:58
Speaker 1: You have to figure out how to reconcile the movement
18:00
Speaker 1: of the sun and the moon with your calendar so
18:03
Speaker 1: that it stays up to date literally right and mechanically
18:09
Speaker 1: but also mathematically right. So several great thinkers figured out
18:15
Speaker 1: that if you take um the tracking of the moon
18:21
Speaker 1: and extrapolated by enough times, it will eventually sync up
18:25
Speaker 1: years down the line with the solar calendar. I think
18:30
Speaker 1: over the course of like nineteen years, and this is
18:32
Speaker 1: what's called the metonic cycle. Right, there's like five hundred
18:36
Speaker 1: and thirty four phases of the moon in one nineteen
18:40
Speaker 1: year period, and if you can track that, then you
18:44
Speaker 1: can keep your calendar in sync. This is the level
18:47
Speaker 1: of sophistication that the the antick, THEA mechanism operates on.
18:54
Speaker 1: And to this point, we did not realize that the
18:57
Speaker 1: ancient Greeks had this level of understanding of astronomy. Yeah,
19:01
Speaker 1: it was. It was a big It was a big
19:03
Speaker 1: fine for a lot of reasons, and that's one of
19:04
Speaker 1: them for sure. Yeah. And one of the reasons that
19:06
Speaker 1: we know that they knew this and we're not just
19:09
Speaker 1: kind of putting our own ideas onto it is when
19:12
Speaker 1: they use that computer tomography, they found inscriptions on all
19:17
Speaker 1: these different gears which basically said how they work and
19:20
Speaker 1: what they track, which is another reason this find was
19:23
Speaker 1: so amazing. It basically had an instruction manual engraved on it.
19:27
Speaker 1: That's right, and we will talk more about that right
19:29
Speaker 1: after this. All right, So you're talking about the inscriptions, um,
19:47
Speaker 1: Like you said, it was a user's guide. If there's
19:49
Speaker 1: going to be a sophisticated piece of equipment, like, uh,
19:53
Speaker 1: this computer, it's gonna come with a book that says
19:56
Speaker 1: here's how you use it. Uh. So the finding I mean,
20:00
Speaker 1: they're doing a pretty good job of discovering the stuff
20:02
Speaker 1: on their own, but then finding the user's guide and
20:05
Speaker 1: piecing that together became even a bigger part of the puzzle.
20:08
Speaker 1: It did. And then that user guy. It also too
20:09
Speaker 1: if like you're an anthropologist from five years in the
20:12
Speaker 1: future and you happened upon a user guide to a
20:15
Speaker 1: mac or something, right, it also describes like the level
20:19
Speaker 1: of technology that the people who built this computer had,
20:23
Speaker 1: Like in writing, it says, this is what we know,
20:25
Speaker 1: this is what we understand. So again, this backdated the
20:30
Speaker 1: understanding of astronomy among the Greeks too, far earlier than
20:35
Speaker 1: we'd ever given them credit for. And it confirmed a
20:38
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that had been thrown out over the
20:40
Speaker 1: years as flights of fancy your imagination by writers who
20:44
Speaker 1: had cited this kind of understanding um of the people
20:48
Speaker 1: of their time, and later historians were like, these people
20:50
Speaker 1: were just just making up and it was a lucky guess.
20:53
Speaker 1: This this mechanism has helped show No, these these guys
20:57
Speaker 1: actually knew what they were talking about. Yeah. One of
20:59
Speaker 1: those was UM. There was a belief, uh, well by
21:03
Speaker 1: some but not held by others, that UM ancient Greeks
21:07
Speaker 1: had calendars where they excluded certain days to adjust the
21:11
Speaker 1: lengths of the months. A lot of people like, no,
21:13
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, there's there's no way that they were
21:16
Speaker 1: that sophisticated this machine basically, and the accompanying guide book
21:20
Speaker 1: proved it to be true, which is pretty great. And
21:25
Speaker 1: because of its sophistication, there a list of people from
21:28
Speaker 1: that time that they think may have had a hand
21:31
Speaker 1: in this UM. Of course, Archimedes, he's gonna be in
21:34
Speaker 1: there anytime something specialist found. Yeah, and there's actually writing
21:37
Speaker 1: about Archimedes creating a like a a sphere, a three
21:42
Speaker 1: dimensional model that actually doesn't really sound like the antithera
21:46
Speaker 1: mechanism now, but it will be on any list if
21:48
Speaker 1: you find something that, like any mechanism, is sophisticated. Hipparchus,
21:54
Speaker 1: who I think, I don't know if we talked about
21:56
Speaker 1: him yet or not. He's a mathematician and astronomer, and uh,
22:01
Speaker 1: I think he the time period worked out for him,
22:03
Speaker 1: so he could have been one of the people involved.
22:05
Speaker 1: My money's on him, you know, yeah, or his student
22:08
Speaker 1: Poseidonest Okay, was that Posidonius? Yeah, I like Poseidoness. I'm
22:16
Speaker 1: sure he did too, because that makes him sound like
22:18
Speaker 1: a Greek god. Yeah. Uh. There are also some other hints,
22:23
Speaker 1: you know, trying to piece together the mystery. UM. One
22:27
Speaker 1: of the inscriptions refers to an athletic event in Rhodes,
22:31
Speaker 1: which is where Hipparcus taught, where his school was. Yeah,
22:35
Speaker 1: and there's a man named Alexander Jones. He's a specialist
22:38
Speaker 1: at n y U and that's what he said. My
22:41
Speaker 1: money's on roads. Is that that's where this thing came from, Yeah, Hipparcus, Yeah,
22:45
Speaker 1: maybe Poseidoness. The other thing that helps is UM, well,
22:50
Speaker 1: it doesn't help necessarily UM Hipparcus's case, but it kind
22:55
Speaker 1: of excludes Archimedes. Some researchers um looked at all Babylonian
23:00
Speaker 1: records of eclipses and tried to sink this thing up,
23:05
Speaker 1: and apparently they were able to exclude hundreds of different
23:08
Speaker 1: possibilities and settled on two oh five b c E
23:13
Speaker 1: being the start date for the mechanism. Yeah, I think
23:16
Speaker 1: it's a little older than they originally thought, right, Yeah,
23:18
Speaker 1: they were thinking fifty two hundred BC, and they're like, no,
23:23
Speaker 1: two oh five is probably the date that this thing
23:25
Speaker 1: was intended to be set to. Because again, this thing's
23:28
Speaker 1: tracking the movements of the bodies in the heavens based
23:33
Speaker 1: on the movement of the sun in the moon, and
23:35
Speaker 1: how do you track that by tracking eclipses? So you
23:38
Speaker 1: would want to set it to an eclipse because there
23:40
Speaker 1: has to be some starting point to set it to, right,
23:43
Speaker 1: So they figured it was two oh five. Well, Archimedes,
23:45
Speaker 1: as you remember, we did a whole episode on him.
23:49
Speaker 1: We did someone the Death Ray. Yes, um, he was
23:52
Speaker 1: killed by a Roman soldier in two twelve, um because
23:55
Speaker 1: he wouldn't pay attention to the soldier who was telling
23:58
Speaker 1: him to um, pay tension, I think. But he was
24:01
Speaker 1: killed in two twelve, so that probably excludes him. He
24:05
Speaker 1: was so smart he knew that of an eclipse was
24:08
Speaker 1: coming in seven years and wanted his mechanism to start.
24:11
Speaker 1: Then he was so broke he couldn't pay attention. Here
24:15
Speaker 1: we hear that one. No, this is my first time
24:18
Speaker 1: but hearing that joke. Yeah, yeah, those are good, you know.
24:21
Speaker 1: In the burn contest or whatever your mama jokes. Yeah, yeah, kids,
24:28
Speaker 1: it's a good one though. Uh what else? What else
24:31
Speaker 1: you got here? Did not think that was going to
24:33
Speaker 1: make an appearance in the UM. Well since then, there
24:37
Speaker 1: have been uh ten models, at least ten um that
24:41
Speaker 1: have been built kind of recreating this thing. Um. There
24:44
Speaker 1: was a watchmaker that um got into it, and of
24:46
Speaker 1: course that was a pretty uh the way the things
24:49
Speaker 1: put together, it seems like a watching clockmaker would be
24:51
Speaker 1: an ideal, stand it. Yeah, made one. Well, they made
24:56
Speaker 1: three of this watch and it's it's like a watch
24:59
Speaker 1: verse and of it. That's pretty amazing. It's pretty cool.
25:01
Speaker 1: I wonder how much they went for those three. Oh,
25:04
Speaker 1: I'm sure they were pretty cheap. Somebody made one out
25:07
Speaker 1: of Legos. Yeah. Was it a Lego set or was
25:11
Speaker 1: it just someone made a Lego model? Oh, they made
25:14
Speaker 1: a Lego model. It was like an Apple engineer. I
25:16
Speaker 1: didn't know. I thought it might have been a Lego set,
25:18
Speaker 1: like a very obscure Lego set. Uh not yet. I'll
25:21
Speaker 1: be the engineers, like, I'll sell you these plans Lego
25:25
Speaker 1: if you want them. Old Kirk check. There's one thing
25:28
Speaker 1: that um, it's amazing when we're like, wow, you know this,
25:31
Speaker 1: this knowledge is even older than we we thought. And
25:36
Speaker 1: a lot of people um point out that in the West, Yes,
25:40
Speaker 1: it took until the fourteen the fourteenth century for this
25:44
Speaker 1: knowledge to come about. We likely got it from um
25:47
Speaker 1: Muslims Muslim scholars, but it's possible that it came to
25:51
Speaker 1: the West via Muslim scholars from the Greeks. So this
25:56
Speaker 1: knowledge was around the Muslims that were interacting with the
26:00
Speaker 1: Weeks gained this knowledge and they had themselves until they
26:05
Speaker 1: finally interacted with us in the West in the fourteenth century. Right,
26:09
Speaker 1: it's pretty amazing. But other people are like, yeah, that's great.
26:13
Speaker 1: Why didn't the Greeks build on this. If they had
26:17
Speaker 1: this sophisticated and understanding of how to track time and
26:21
Speaker 1: the movement of the heavenly bodies, why did they stop there? Well,
26:28
Speaker 1: they may not have. They did, that's the thing. Well, no,
26:31
Speaker 1: I mean until we find the next thing that was
26:35
Speaker 1: years after that that we previously didn't know about. Now
26:37
Speaker 1: the point is like, why didn't they build stuff that
26:40
Speaker 1: survived and came down to this day and they didn't,
26:44
Speaker 1: Like there's there's incontrovertibly they did not build on it
26:48
Speaker 1: or else we would have it today. And Arthur C.
26:50
Speaker 1: Clark is saying, if they had built on this level
26:53
Speaker 1: of sophistication and it had continued uninterrupted today, we'd be
26:58
Speaker 1: traveling amongst the stars by now, after two thousand years
27:02
Speaker 1: of having this knowledge. I don't see how anyone can
27:05
Speaker 1: say that, though, How can you say that they'll never
27:06
Speaker 1: find another mechanism after this that built on that? You won't.
27:12
Speaker 1: What I'm saying is that knowledge wasn't built on, and
27:15
Speaker 1: built on, and built on and built on uninterrupted. Oh
27:18
Speaker 1: so they may have built on. They could have, but
27:20
Speaker 1: for what from what we understand that they didn't. My
27:23
Speaker 1: money's on finding something else that makes a little more
27:26
Speaker 1: sense out of this. Well, they did find something else.
27:27
Speaker 1: In three a man in Beirut was in a bizarre
27:31
Speaker 1: and found some weird geared mechanism, and they figured out
27:34
Speaker 1: that it was a sixth century ce Um calendar, like
27:39
Speaker 1: a geared calendar. It's the second oldest geared mechanism known
27:43
Speaker 1: to humankind for now, after the anti Cathera mechanism. We
27:48
Speaker 1: may find an entire civilization underwater. No, but you never know, alright,
27:56
Speaker 1: you never know, You never know. I'm sure. Before they
28:00
Speaker 1: on this, they were saying that they were never advanced
28:03
Speaker 1: enough to make something like this. Yeah, the point is
28:05
Speaker 1: that that they weren't advanced enough. The point is is
28:08
Speaker 1: they didn't build on this advancement until we find out
28:12
Speaker 1: that they have right. Well, whatever whatever came in and
28:15
Speaker 1: broke that building on it and interrupted it, that was
28:18
Speaker 1: That sucks because we could be far more advanced than
28:21
Speaker 1: we are. It could have been a volcano that covered
28:24
Speaker 1: a laboratory and ash that sunk underwater, and that's where
28:29
Speaker 1: the underwater civilization has been. Yeah, you never know in
28:32
Speaker 1: the lab Uh. If you want to know more about
28:35
Speaker 1: the anti Kate Thera mechanism, you just try your hand
28:37
Speaker 1: at spelling that. It's fun to say, isn't it. Yeah,
28:40
Speaker 1: And it's easy to spell if he sounds um and
28:43
Speaker 1: do that in the search bar at how stuff works.
28:45
Speaker 1: And since they said search parts, time for listener, ma'am,
28:49
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this mea culpa. Hey, guys, absolutely love
28:53
Speaker 1: stuff you should know and have listened to every episode
28:55
Speaker 1: many more than once. You keep me company on many
28:58
Speaker 1: a long commute. While I was listening to the Void
29:00
Speaker 1: That Manuscript podcast, which was awesome, I noticed Chuck said
29:04
Speaker 1: a possible explanation was mental illness. Josh said, yes, like
29:08
Speaker 1: an autistic monk. I'm sure you know this, but autism
29:11
Speaker 1: is a developmental disorder, not a mental illness. Behavioral therapist
29:14
Speaker 1: who worked with autistic children. That makes me very sensitive
29:17
Speaker 1: these matters. Thanks for your great work. My favorite ever
29:20
Speaker 1: was Berlin Wall and then it's from Tricia Flowers, and
29:23
Speaker 1: I think her subject line was I still love you guys.
29:27
Speaker 1: Uh So, we've gotten quite a lot of feedback on this,
29:31
Speaker 1: and I'll let you take it away. It was a mistake. Yeah,
29:33
Speaker 1: it's totally misspoke. Yeah, I don't think that autism is
29:37
Speaker 1: a form of mental illness. What I should have said
29:40
Speaker 1: and meant to say was or an autistic monk or
29:44
Speaker 1: a monk with autism, I think is the proper way
29:47
Speaker 1: to put it. Yeah, so not like yeah, sometimes in
29:51
Speaker 1: the heat of the moment, sure like or as but yes, no,
29:56
Speaker 1: I don't think that those two are the same. Yeah,
29:58
Speaker 1: So all apologies people. We we certainly don't think that,
30:01
Speaker 1: and I always want to correct ourselves, so, especially when
30:05
Speaker 1: something we'd say accidentally causes distress among people. There's no
30:09
Speaker 1: and to let that stand. Agreed, yeah uh yeah, So
30:13
Speaker 1: thank you Tricia. We appreciate you um writing in to
30:18
Speaker 1: let us. We'll set us straight, call us out, whatever
30:21
Speaker 1: you wanna call it in a very nice way. Yes uh.
30:24
Speaker 1: And if you want to set us straight or say whatever,
30:27
Speaker 1: you can get in touch with us via s y
30:30
Speaker 1: s K podcast on Twitter. You can send us an email,
30:33
Speaker 1: the Stuff Podcast, the House, Stuff Works dot com. You
30:36
Speaker 1: can hang out with us on Facebook dot com, slash
30:38
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30:40
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30:42
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