One thing I've considered from inside this bubble you're observing; I'm one of the last of a dying breed of machinists. We made scientific research tools, seafloor penetrating core samplers with Acme-threaded segments, ice-shaving machines to separate segments of ice cores without melting, nitric oxide containment systems for atmospheric research, dynamic testbed structures for torpedoes and later for electric motors, gear ausrolling tools, the list seems endless, twenty-two years of just that for me alone, and all of it without the assists of computer numerical control. We invented ways to machine what was needed; the ultrasonic array to be used to scan the reactor core at TMI, I and two others made, overnight. I see machinists coming to be now, they know nothing of any of that, and no one cares. It dies with me.
Now multiply my short life times the billions who've passed, through the milennia. Yes, man will always have lost more than he knows. Far, far more.
Analog tech is vastly superior. Modern CNC requires no thought beyond how to program and load tools. So much has been lost, example: Duesenberg auto restoration by Jay Leno stopped because he needed herringbone gearing replaced in the transmission. Nobody has that capability anymore. No CNC could ever handle it, not a production part anymore, feh, who needs it?? Isn’t just that, it’s most complex parts. “Printed” parts are a joke. Porous, weak, non-functional junk. Your Acme machines are high-production automatics. Analog yes, programs no.
Add to that, photography. No matter how dense the pixel map, no digital rendering even has the depth or potential of silver halides. In most cases it isn’t obvious because the human eye doesn’t detect the diff so it's irrelevant, right? But try to bring up the texture of sun-drenched tree bark, a digital photo doesn’t have that information. Analog does, burn it in. Carbon printing, color photos that last forever, technology abandoned. Then, digital music. No solid state amplifier could ever produce the tonalities and audible perfection of vacuum tube amps. But digital recordings don't have that information anyway. Nobody knows, nobody cares.
More has already been lost than you’ll ever see, hear or think.
That story about Jay Leno is crazy in that our ‘superior’ modern technology can’t reproduce something that was manufactured over 85 years ago. Digital often equates to disposable, too. I remember that many of those machines were actually from the 1910s and were built to run on steam, not electricity.
I've read nothing else about this device; your account raises some questions that may have already been answered elsewhere. Based on what's visible and what has been revealed through imagery, has any attempt been made to build a working duplicate of this machine? Since it was recovered by laypersons, not archaeologists who would have noted and recorded its precise locational context within the shipwreck, could it be that it was lost many centuries later and coincidentally landed among the debris of the earlier archaeological site? Has radiocarbon dating of a sample of the wood been attempted?
To answer your first question: yes, several working duplicates have been built! Scholars like Derek de Solla Price, Michael Wright, and most recently the UCL Antikythera Research Team have created intricate physical and 3D digital models. Watching those bronze gears mesh together to calculate lunar phases and eclipses in real time is like seeing a ancient mechanical computer wake up.
Regarding the timeline and the possibility of a later intrusion: archaeologists actually ruled that out pretty early on. The wooden housing and gear fragments were found completely encrusted and fused within the exact same marine conglomerate layer as the Hellenistic amphorae, glassware, and coins from around 70–60 BCE. The physical chemical bonding of the corrosion proves it went down with the rest of the cargo.
And on radiocarbon dating: yes! C-14 analysis was carried out on fragments of the wooden frame. The testing dated the wood to roughly between 200 and 50 BCE, which lines up seamlessly with the astronomical inscriptions engraved directly onto the bronze plates.
Thank you so much for reading so attentively and bringing such great questions to the conversation!
Thanks for answering my questions so thoroughly! I now have no doubt that this device is from the claimed period. Wow. It's mind-boggling.
Several years ago I saw a display of artifacts from the A.D. 79 destruction of Pompeii. Among them were bronze water valves with rotating parts that required a high degree of precision fitting in order not to leak. They must have been finished on some sort of lathe. Previously I had no idea such technology existed at that time.
We often imagine antiquity as a time of rough stone and simple tools, but Roman plumbing and Greek metallurgy relied on remarkably sophisticated machine tools. Bow-lathes and early treadle-lathes were used to turn both wood and metal with incredible accuracy. The tolerances needed to make a water valve leak-proof or to cut 30 interlocking gear teeth on bronze plates were right at the boundary of what ancient technology could accomplish.
It’s always incredible when a physical artifact from a museum display suddenly bridges that gap and changes our whole mental map of the past.
There are examples of structural engineering that we can’t duplicate today, not only in the structures produced, but in the processes utilized to produce them.
Archeologists generally believe that mankind left the hunter-gatherer stage 3500-4500 years ago, but new technologies for examining rock structures (such as the pyramids) put their estimates of how long ago they were built to 22-26,000 years ago. Look up Cassie Coppersmith, host of the “Secrets in Stone” podcast. Timothy Alberino also has described some of the recent discoveries that put estimates for the age of structures to be considerably older than the prevailing beliefs of most archeologists. There is evidence of cataclysm not well understood which left hundreds of dinosaurs and large mammals swept by water into large groups: the evidence also points to thermal burns and bone damage attributed to air blast in many of the remains.
I’m out of my depth here, but the two interviews I listened to last week support a growing number of scientists who have evidence found worldwide that supports that there were advanced structures built on Earth tens of thousands of years ago - and in many countries, marvelous miracles of engineering, design, manufacturing, and construction.
Do tell. Electron scanning microscopes?. The machines that count the number of uranium atoms in each crystal? The machines that analyze cosmic ray tracks in the rock? The scanners that measure the precision in which these 10,000-100,000 ton blocks of solid rock are cut? The neutron scanners that measure the amount and degree of water and sand erosion? The scanners that measure alpha, beta, gamma radiation emitted by the rock crystals? The alignment of nano-particle magnetism? The scanners that measure opacity of silica crystals to determine the amount of x-ray absorption? The machines that scan these structures to determine the processes used to cut and form these massive blocks, accurate to a nanometer?
Please tell me which of these machines and processes are pseudoscience! These are only a few of the devices that tell the complete story. Sounds as if the use of these machines trump your emotionally-weighted opinion.
Our knowledge is built on hubris. There are very few actual scientists who can stand having their personal pet theories questioned. The consequences of this is a plugged pipeline where real knowledge stagnates until someone eventually breaks through. Then the cycle of "scientific" ignorance begins again.
The narcissism of modernity is a coping mechanism that helps us avoid thinking about advanced civilizations of the past. It’s terrifying to consider the implications. When fossil fuels are depleted it will be like we never existed at all, except for a few rusty trinkets scattered around in unlikely places.
I know you probably didn't mean it this way but saying something "shouldn't exist" is insulting to my people and colonialist, verging on racist. Why shouldn't it exist? It's the same thing when people question how Egyptians built the pyramids.
There is an underriding current of thought throughout much of human history that previous generations - without the benefit of the present collected body of scientific/technological knowledge - were somehow less capable thinkers and artisans than those of present times (conversely, there are also periods where the past is granted an almost-divine sense of greatness).
Every generation is full of hubris, thinking itself more capable than its father’s.
____________
The Antikythera mechanism is a curiosity that I have yet to explore in-depth, but I could definitely see it being the sole product of one individual or team that was unfortunately lost on its maiden voyage of exhibition.
The first couple centuries BCE were pretty eventful, and often violent, in the Mediterranean. The sea was never a guarantee, and war tends to be a great driver of innovation but a terrible agent of preservation.
You may want to read mathematician Anatoly Fomenmo's chronology research and suggested reco struction of history to try and explain countless repetitions he discovered. Even Isaac Newton wrote a book inquiring what was going on. Conclusion, no lost 1000 years. Jesus born in 1152. Time keeping was by zodiacs of the night skies. That is an ottoman gadget like those you mention.Olympics were nubilee celebrations to conmemorate Zeus-jesus.
I haven't got the reference to hand, but Irving Finkel of the British Museum has suggested something similar regarding writing. He is an Assyriologist but his point was in relation to Göbekli Tepe.
I first read about it from the prince of crazy theory mumblers, von Daniken, thankfully almost forgotten now, I'm guessing, since nobody else has commented about it yet, but doubtless having amassed enough wealth for himself.
Undoubtedly, in that era, there was far more fine working with materials like wood and clay, than of metal, skills that could be learned and taught more easily.
It beats me, though, that the stone carvings that show wheels for vehicles are not accompanied by ones that show legs. Making them needed no great science or mathematics that wasn't already known at the time. By design, they are much more nimble, and can handle unprepared terrain.
However, one important point that emerges from the essay is that 'making' skills trump digital templates by a wide margin, which is why the blueprint for building Chalopedes starts with small mechanical workshops, maybe just a cut above home workshops, that involve 'learning' skills, for youngsters and adults, placed as high or more than learning book knowledge.
I do not know if it has already been mentioned, but my wife came up with a compelling idea as to why this mechanism was on board a ship: navigation. Seafarers had to look for constellations and stellar objects like Venus/Aphrodite or Mars/Ares. So perhaps this mechanism was never meant to be stationary, and onboard the doomed ship it was not to be transported to another place onshore. Instead it may have belonged to the essential equipment of at least the most state of the art ships.
One thing I've considered from inside this bubble you're observing; I'm one of the last of a dying breed of machinists. We made scientific research tools, seafloor penetrating core samplers with Acme-threaded segments, ice-shaving machines to separate segments of ice cores without melting, nitric oxide containment systems for atmospheric research, dynamic testbed structures for torpedoes and later for electric motors, gear ausrolling tools, the list seems endless, twenty-two years of just that for me alone, and all of it without the assists of computer numerical control. We invented ways to machine what was needed; the ultrasonic array to be used to scan the reactor core at TMI, I and two others made, overnight. I see machinists coming to be now, they know nothing of any of that, and no one cares. It dies with me.
Now multiply my short life times the billions who've passed, through the milennia. Yes, man will always have lost more than he knows. Far, far more.
Analog technology truly accomplished great things! I actually worked at a shop running Acme machines for a few months.
Analog tech is vastly superior. Modern CNC requires no thought beyond how to program and load tools. So much has been lost, example: Duesenberg auto restoration by Jay Leno stopped because he needed herringbone gearing replaced in the transmission. Nobody has that capability anymore. No CNC could ever handle it, not a production part anymore, feh, who needs it?? Isn’t just that, it’s most complex parts. “Printed” parts are a joke. Porous, weak, non-functional junk. Your Acme machines are high-production automatics. Analog yes, programs no.
Add to that, photography. No matter how dense the pixel map, no digital rendering even has the depth or potential of silver halides. In most cases it isn’t obvious because the human eye doesn’t detect the diff so it's irrelevant, right? But try to bring up the texture of sun-drenched tree bark, a digital photo doesn’t have that information. Analog does, burn it in. Carbon printing, color photos that last forever, technology abandoned. Then, digital music. No solid state amplifier could ever produce the tonalities and audible perfection of vacuum tube amps. But digital recordings don't have that information anyway. Nobody knows, nobody cares.
More has already been lost than you’ll ever see, hear or think.
That story about Jay Leno is crazy in that our ‘superior’ modern technology can’t reproduce something that was manufactured over 85 years ago. Digital often equates to disposable, too. I remember that many of those machines were actually from the 1910s and were built to run on steam, not electricity.
Fascinating, well-written article. Thanks!
I've read nothing else about this device; your account raises some questions that may have already been answered elsewhere. Based on what's visible and what has been revealed through imagery, has any attempt been made to build a working duplicate of this machine? Since it was recovered by laypersons, not archaeologists who would have noted and recorded its precise locational context within the shipwreck, could it be that it was lost many centuries later and coincidentally landed among the debris of the earlier archaeological site? Has radiocarbon dating of a sample of the wood been attempted?
To answer your first question: yes, several working duplicates have been built! Scholars like Derek de Solla Price, Michael Wright, and most recently the UCL Antikythera Research Team have created intricate physical and 3D digital models. Watching those bronze gears mesh together to calculate lunar phases and eclipses in real time is like seeing a ancient mechanical computer wake up.
Regarding the timeline and the possibility of a later intrusion: archaeologists actually ruled that out pretty early on. The wooden housing and gear fragments were found completely encrusted and fused within the exact same marine conglomerate layer as the Hellenistic amphorae, glassware, and coins from around 70–60 BCE. The physical chemical bonding of the corrosion proves it went down with the rest of the cargo.
And on radiocarbon dating: yes! C-14 analysis was carried out on fragments of the wooden frame. The testing dated the wood to roughly between 200 and 50 BCE, which lines up seamlessly with the astronomical inscriptions engraved directly onto the bronze plates.
Thank you so much for reading so attentively and bringing such great questions to the conversation!
Thanks for answering my questions so thoroughly! I now have no doubt that this device is from the claimed period. Wow. It's mind-boggling.
Several years ago I saw a display of artifacts from the A.D. 79 destruction of Pompeii. Among them were bronze water valves with rotating parts that required a high degree of precision fitting in order not to leak. They must have been finished on some sort of lathe. Previously I had no idea such technology existed at that time.
We often imagine antiquity as a time of rough stone and simple tools, but Roman plumbing and Greek metallurgy relied on remarkably sophisticated machine tools. Bow-lathes and early treadle-lathes were used to turn both wood and metal with incredible accuracy. The tolerances needed to make a water valve leak-proof or to cut 30 interlocking gear teeth on bronze plates were right at the boundary of what ancient technology could accomplish.
It’s always incredible when a physical artifact from a museum display suddenly bridges that gap and changes our whole mental map of the past.
Yes!
Fascinating - and always have thought the device found was a miniaturised version, there must have been precedents before that - surely?
Makes me ponder the idea that most people today don't actually know how our computers smartphones actually work
There are examples of structural engineering that we can’t duplicate today, not only in the structures produced, but in the processes utilized to produce them.
Archeologists generally believe that mankind left the hunter-gatherer stage 3500-4500 years ago, but new technologies for examining rock structures (such as the pyramids) put their estimates of how long ago they were built to 22-26,000 years ago. Look up Cassie Coppersmith, host of the “Secrets in Stone” podcast. Timothy Alberino also has described some of the recent discoveries that put estimates for the age of structures to be considerably older than the prevailing beliefs of most archeologists. There is evidence of cataclysm not well understood which left hundreds of dinosaurs and large mammals swept by water into large groups: the evidence also points to thermal burns and bone damage attributed to air blast in many of the remains.
I’m out of my depth here, but the two interviews I listened to last week support a growing number of scientists who have evidence found worldwide that supports that there were advanced structures built on Earth tens of thousands of years ago - and in many countries, marvelous miracles of engineering, design, manufacturing, and construction.
That's all pseudoscience.
Do tell. Electron scanning microscopes?. The machines that count the number of uranium atoms in each crystal? The machines that analyze cosmic ray tracks in the rock? The scanners that measure the precision in which these 10,000-100,000 ton blocks of solid rock are cut? The neutron scanners that measure the amount and degree of water and sand erosion? The scanners that measure alpha, beta, gamma radiation emitted by the rock crystals? The alignment of nano-particle magnetism? The scanners that measure opacity of silica crystals to determine the amount of x-ray absorption? The machines that scan these structures to determine the processes used to cut and form these massive blocks, accurate to a nanometer?
Please tell me which of these machines and processes are pseudoscience! These are only a few of the devices that tell the complete story. Sounds as if the use of these machines trump your emotionally-weighted opinion.
Our knowledge is built on hubris. There are very few actual scientists who can stand having their personal pet theories questioned. The consequences of this is a plugged pipeline where real knowledge stagnates until someone eventually breaks through. Then the cycle of "scientific" ignorance begins again.
So fascinating!
The narcissism of modernity is a coping mechanism that helps us avoid thinking about advanced civilizations of the past. It’s terrifying to consider the implications. When fossil fuels are depleted it will be like we never existed at all, except for a few rusty trinkets scattered around in unlikely places.
No doubt if this thing was just a bit more rusted the experts would say it’s probably an alien UFO guidance system.
I know you probably didn't mean it this way but saying something "shouldn't exist" is insulting to my people and colonialist, verging on racist. Why shouldn't it exist? It's the same thing when people question how Egyptians built the pyramids.
There is an underriding current of thought throughout much of human history that previous generations - without the benefit of the present collected body of scientific/technological knowledge - were somehow less capable thinkers and artisans than those of present times (conversely, there are also periods where the past is granted an almost-divine sense of greatness).
Every generation is full of hubris, thinking itself more capable than its father’s.
____________
The Antikythera mechanism is a curiosity that I have yet to explore in-depth, but I could definitely see it being the sole product of one individual or team that was unfortunately lost on its maiden voyage of exhibition.
The first couple centuries BCE were pretty eventful, and often violent, in the Mediterranean. The sea was never a guarantee, and war tends to be a great driver of innovation but a terrible agent of preservation.
You may want to read mathematician Anatoly Fomenmo's chronology research and suggested reco struction of history to try and explain countless repetitions he discovered. Even Isaac Newton wrote a book inquiring what was going on. Conclusion, no lost 1000 years. Jesus born in 1152. Time keeping was by zodiacs of the night skies. That is an ottoman gadget like those you mention.Olympics were nubilee celebrations to conmemorate Zeus-jesus.
As Radar/technology advances in the coming years we’re going to find more stuff like this 💪🏽👊‼️
I haven't got the reference to hand, but Irving Finkel of the British Museum has suggested something similar regarding writing. He is an Assyriologist but his point was in relation to Göbekli Tepe.
I first read about it from the prince of crazy theory mumblers, von Daniken, thankfully almost forgotten now, I'm guessing, since nobody else has commented about it yet, but doubtless having amassed enough wealth for himself.
Undoubtedly, in that era, there was far more fine working with materials like wood and clay, than of metal, skills that could be learned and taught more easily.
It beats me, though, that the stone carvings that show wheels for vehicles are not accompanied by ones that show legs. Making them needed no great science or mathematics that wasn't already known at the time. By design, they are much more nimble, and can handle unprepared terrain.
However, one important point that emerges from the essay is that 'making' skills trump digital templates by a wide margin, which is why the blueprint for building Chalopedes starts with small mechanical workshops, maybe just a cut above home workshops, that involve 'learning' skills, for youngsters and adults, placed as high or more than learning book knowledge.
I do not know if it has already been mentioned, but my wife came up with a compelling idea as to why this mechanism was on board a ship: navigation. Seafarers had to look for constellations and stellar objects like Venus/Aphrodite or Mars/Ares. So perhaps this mechanism was never meant to be stationary, and onboard the doomed ship it was not to be transported to another place onshore. Instead it may have belonged to the essential equipment of at least the most state of the art ships.