Hi everyone I am new and I have a question. I am hoping that I can learn tons from what you guys have to say.
Here it goes :eek:
do any of you think that if the Antikythera Mechanism could have altered events (I know that’s a pretty broad statement but feel free to add knowledge where you see fit!) for Greece had they mass produced it and made it an essential item?
I mean I was assuming that it could have helped people prepare ahead of times for seasons (even though were probably capable of doing that without it.) and the military advantages would be great for determining where soldiers were on the field also they could have been selling them to help out economically right?
These are all my assumptions so I am kinda shooting in the dark
be a pal and show this post some love!
Much thanks!
Per the wiki I’m not seeing what it was really going to do for society at large. It improved the accuracy of astronomical predictions. That’s not really all that big a deal for a semi-primitive agrarian economy.
I tend to agree with astro. The Mechanism wasn’t a stored-program computer, it was a special-purpose astronomical calculator. Yes, its mechanical complexity is surprising for its time, but it wouldn’t have had much of an influence on people’s lives in ancient Greece.
On the other hand, I guess if these devices had been more widespread they might not have been forgotten for millenia. Development of escapement mechanisms, adding machines, analytical engines, etc. could have happened sooner as a result. Pure speculation, of course.
If they had been common, then things like simple calculating machines would have been made. There’s a reproduction of a Babbage Difference Engine in Mountain View. Imagine having had something like this a century after the AM.
Well, I’m imagining it. I’m guessing it would have been about as useful as Babbage’s Engine actually was in practice. Which is around zero. Small mechanical calculators did get some use in the early 20th century, but certainly not enough to change history.
And note that the Babbage engine was in a time when ocean navigation required lots of repetitive calculation (especially to produce tables of astronomical events), where a mechanical calculator would have been very useful – not that the Babbage Engine ever reached a point where it actually was used for this. Navigation in the Mediterranean isn’t as complex, and so there was really no useful task for a calculating machine.
I doubt they could have been able to make a lot of these machines. It must have taken a master artisan years to execute the design (never mind how long it must have taken for the astronomer to come up with the design itself). Imagine having to build all those cogs, axles and whatnot, with nothing by iron-age tools. You wouldn’t be able to cast them out of a mold, because casting in ancient Greece was still at a primitive stage - just look at their coins. You’d have to chisel and file them down, one by one. I doubt an unskilled worker could have done that. But skilled artisans cost money, and they’re usually needed for other things, too. If they’re making AMs all the time, who’s going to make jewelry, armour, cutlery, tools, medical instruments?
It would have been considerably less significant were it more common. With only one, whoever has it can make himself out to be a wonder-worker, with his ability to predict eclipses and the like, and I imagine that whoever it was did just that. With multiples, though, the ability to predict eclipses becomes much less wondrous. And predicting eclipses has very little practical value beyond impressing the masses.
If the mechanism were widely distributed, it might have the effect of helping create a larger pool of numerate individuals. But I don’t think it would have helped that much since there weren’t a great deal of applications for advanced math. Maybe the gearing and workings could have inspired others to innovate new machinery for other purposes, but who knows?
Right. Note also that the Antikythera mechanism itself was not, even in its own day, the most accurate means of making astronomical predictions.
If you knew the theory and parameters of Hellenistic geocentric astronomy of that era (or had a set of astronomical tables calculated according to them), you could compute by hand predicted planetary positions, times of eclipses, etc., that would be more accurate and precise than what the gear-system and graduated scales of the mechanism would be able to represent.
The Antikythera mechanism was essentially an expensive luxury “scientific toy”, like a privately-owned planetarium or perhaps a really really high-end personal telescope in the modern day. Its value was in the elaborate gee-whizzery of its complex and laboriously crafted mechanical technology, rather than in any actual applications to astronomical research or pedagogy.
Again, the Antikythera mechanism didn’t make any difference at all to actual astronomers’ ability to predict things like eclipses: they already had the theoretical and computational knowledge that the mechanism was based on. And they would have disseminated their knowledge in the much simpler form of written documents.
Similarly, a rich man today could use a private planetarium to predict astronomical events even if he didn’t understand anything about astronomy. But neither astronomers nor the public at large would be looking to him as a source of astronomical predictions. He wouldn’t be an inimitable wonder-worker: he’d just be a rich man with a cool toy.
Not sure what you mean by this, small mechanical calculators (adding machines, cash registers, tabulators (think Hollerith Machine), sorters, etc) changed history quite a bit starting in the later 1800s, allowing and increasing the growth of large commercial, retail, and business firms - logistics, sales, control, auditing, enumeration (census), mass-mailings, and so on. OK, so their effect on society (and hence history) was more subtle and indirect than say the US Civil War or WWI, but still - well, as the poster child for mechical computation, consider the tabulation of the 1880 US census (mostly hand tabulation) vs the 1890 US census (using the Hollerith Tabulation machines I mentioned above) - “These machines reduced a ten-year job to three months (different sources give different numbers, ranging from six weeks to three years) [and] saved the 1890 taxpayers five million dollars”
The question obviously is - so what, what is it good for?
In a relatively benign Mediterranean climate, who cares about predicting the seasons other than the Egyptians on the Nile? The variability of weather was probably more of an issue than the seasons when it came to military or naval campaigns.
If they had created a good calculator, then that might have had an impact in business/science development - but the functionality of a lot of our numerical technology revolves around the decimal system; the idea of zero and digit placeholders was not sufficiently developed then to make a calculator a simple design.
And the answer seems to be: for impressing people with your really cool high-end gizmo.
For a geared analog device, the A.M. does in fact do a pretty impressive job of modeling celestial motions according to pre-Ptolemaic Hellenistic astronomical theory. But it doesn’t do anything, in terms of providing actual prediction data, that a contemporary trained astronomer couldn’t have done better.
Predicting the seasons is just a small part of what the A.M. could do: its “wow factor” came more from its ability to approximately reproduce fairly complicated solar/lunar cycles and possibly also positions of the star-planets (i.e., what we know as the five naked-eye-visible planets).
If you wanted an invention that would have changed Greece the most, I would vote for the stirrup. The horse collar would have more impact on the Mediterranean area, but the mountainous terrain of Greece wasn’t well suited for that type of agriculture.
Don’t forget the Jacquard loom, invented in 1801 (see Jacquard machine - Wikipedia) which made fine weaving much easier. I once watched one for a half hour in a textile museum in Kyoto. Then the operator turned to me and explained (in good English) how Jacquard looms had been brought back to Japan after the Meiji revolution (1867, IIRC) and improved. This one was operated electrically. The card stack must have had several hundred cards in it. I mentioned this to the operator and said it must have been a lot of work to prepare them. He chuckled slightly before he told me that the cards had been punched by a computer.
Agreed. I guess I thought it could have helped with mapping, although the info I read on it suggested it would have been useless on the sea because it would have rusted the cogs, and rendered them useless.
OK! In that case I think I was kind of confused about its purpose. I was under the impression that it was kind of like a ancient map quest(for lack of a better way to say it) or something, but I read about it further and it says it predicts solar eclipse I don’t really know what good that would be.
Think of it kind of like a combination calendar/planetarium. It showed positions of the celestial bodies, aligned with scales representing standard time units like years and seasons and days.
Predicting eclipses in classical antiquity served two major purposes:
(1) to allow religious and/or civil leaders to arrange propitiatory rites to alleviate what were widely believed to be the unlucky consequences of an eclipse, and
(2) to pursue and show off scientific investigation.
Predicting solar eclipses (which are harder than lunar ones) in pre-Ptolemaic astronomy required a fairly non-trivial mix of spherical geometry and reasonably accurate orbital models and parameters, so it was a fairly impressive achievement. Showing off a mechanized planetary-model gizmo with eclipse-predicting capability was essentially the Hellenistic equivalent of putting up Mars Rover images on the internet: a combination of “isn’t the universe fascinating” and “aren’t these clever gadgets just totes cool!”.
Regarded by whom? Any educated person in Hellenistic society (and many uneducated ones, such as some of the slaves in upper-class households) would have had a basic familiarity with what astronomy was and what astronomers did.
Sure, goat-herding yokels out on the island of Bymfykos might have regarded an accurate eclipse prediction as some kind of wizardly miracle, but I think you’re underestimating the intellectual sophistication of Hellenistic culture if you assume that that would have been the general attitude towards such a feat.
