I think that the goat-herds of Bymfykos, or their socioeconomic and educational equivalent, would be far more common than the educated upper class, so the attitude of such goat-herds should be regarded as the general attitude.
Welllll, but astronomers and owners of expensive astronomical toys weren’t likely to be trying to impress the goat-herds of Bymfykos or their socioeconomic equivalents, even if they were demographically a more numerous group.
Remember, what you originally said was
I disagree, on the grounds that the people that the elite owner of such a gizmo (or alternatively, a professional astronomer) would be likely to encounter would be too intellectually sophisticated to regard him as a mysterious “wonder-worker” just because he could make astronomical predictions.
And the people who were naive enough about astronomy to think such a thing were mostly herding goats out on Bymfykos or selling fish in the city market or repairing roads, etc. The astronomer or wealthy dilettante in question would hardly have been using them as his audience to show off his cool science chops.
Speaking of toys, here is an article about it being built using legos - if you search for “Antikythera Mechanism legos” there is a youtube video of it working.
More seriously, researchers used modern medical probing techniques and a lot of clever methods to read the inscriptions inside and discover the number of teeth on the internal gears. Computer Magazine had an article about it, and the researchers built an amazing computer model of the mechanism in operation.
The educated elite who had it didn’t need to interact significantly with the unwashed masses in order to impress them. He could have just decreed from the balcony of his palace “In three days time, the light of the full moon shall be extinguished!”, and even the goatherds would be able to watch and see that it happened.
Oh, and I’m kind of surprised it was possible to build a replica out of Lego. There are only a limited set of gears available in Lego, and I would have naively expected the Antikytheria Mechanism to require a few with peculiar numbers of teeth.
To mass produce anything you need first an industrial revolution. There’s pretty impressive ancient machinery that never got beyond the stage of curiosity for the entertainment of the ruling classes.
:dubious: Got anything except this argumentum ab ano to indicate that any wealthy amateur astronomers (or professional astronomers, for that matter) in Hellenistic times in fact had any interest in going through such a performance on their own account?
As I noted a few posts ago, religious and civic officials (who of course kept some astronomers on staff to work out the calculations) did indeed use such predictions as part of general public relations on the part of state and temple. But AFAIK, there is jack-shit in the way of evidence that individuals with elite astronomical knowledge or equipment actually tried to display it directly to the “unwashed masses” to “make themselves out to be wonder-workers” in the mind of the general public.
Nope, IMHO the researchers working on the Antikythera Mechanism are correct when they describe its function as a luxury scientific toy for the educated elite, not some kind of fantasy-novel Instrument of Pseudo-wizardly Power wielded to gain the adoration of the Unwashed Masses.
Anyway, at this point you’ve pretty much obliterated your original speculative argument for the rarity value of the A.M.:
If you just want to proclaim accurate eclipse predictions from your balcony to impress the aforesaid unwashed masses, you don’t need any kind of elaborate geared orrery. All you need is a sufficient amount of astronomical education and some kind of writing surface to do your calculations on. And such prerequisites were available to quite a few members of educated Hellenistic elites.
Have a boo at the Banū Mūsā brothers, who hundreds of years later, took this technology to the next level.
I was going to make this point - that the OP was right in that if the ancients could have mass-produced these complicated devices it would have been significantly history changing… But not because of the inherent usefulness of these astronomical calculation aids, but because they’d have discovered advanced techniques of mass production that could have seriously changed the economy and trade patterns of the times.
It looks like it would hurt if it hit you in the head. If they’d been able to mass-produce them, considering they already had the torsion catapult…the effects could have been devastating.
OK, Kimstu, I’ll drop the argument.
he problem is, other than impressing the gullible, what practical use was such a mechanism? In broader terms, what practical use is any geared clock-work type of mechanism? A set of toy teeth that chatter as they hop (no indication they knew of clockwork springs?), or a gizmo that could predict the eclipses, may have made an interesting toy. However, a device that everyone would want, that would encourage many craftsmen to learn how to make one, that would advance the overall state of the art in mechanical design and construction - this was not.
The thing that amazed archaeologists and scientists was the til-then unknown ability of Greeks to make this detailed a level of gears.
Consider a practical item hat did use such technology - the portable clock. This was a result of steady sream of convergent details: gradual miniaturization of clock-tower mechanisms; the more formal and time-sensitive nature of commerce; the usefulness of reliable timepieces in ship navigation; precision metalcrafting, etc. When the need arose for an accurate timepiece, the technology evolved to satisfy that.
I’m trying to imagine any application that really needed clockwork tech in the classical age.
As an example of tech that really did emerge to met demand - Scientific American had an article several decades ago about the mass production of clay oil lamps in Rome. There was a huge market for those little oil lamps (looked like a flattened teapot) and sme clever guys eventually figured out how to cast/press top and bottom separately, join them with wet clay and fire them.