The first thing to come to mind is the “wright flyer”, but I can see voting for the aircraft carrier.
unclviny
The Voyager I spacecraft. Nothing manmade has been further from earth than it… I think that’s pretty awesome.
Plus, in a couple hundred years, it’s gonna bring us a black hole and a groovy bald robot chick.
Giant mining machines are always fun.
Or Korolev’s “N1” lunar rockets. Too bad they all exploded. (At least they weren’t trying the NUCLEAR POWERED versions that might have been…messy)
The Apollo 11 spacecraft has to be it.
But this thread might qualify - anything that gets Telomere666 to reply should get some sort of recognition. He/she is averaging one post per YEAR.
Pimpbot 5000. He’s powered by dynamos and his stable is full of hos.
How could it be anything other than the biggest computer ever built?
~ Isaac
Eh, they make the Biggest Computer Ever Built every couple of years. It’s getting tiresome.
Some of the Krupp giant mining machines are pretty awesome. It’s like an oil rig on wheels.
Allowing for time of invention, I nominate a chess playing robot which plays the ending of King and Rook v King.
It is currently in the Polytechnic Museum, Madrid, and works using pulleys, weights and wires.
it was built in 1890!
Well, there was the SuperGun from Project Babylon.
But I’d still vote for the Saturn V.
On the non-serious front, I nominate this.
On the serious front, it has to be nuclear weapons. The OP said “awesome”. The idea of something roughly the size of a microwave oven that can release that much energy, and the understanding of pretty deep physics required for its construction, are both awesome.
By comparison, an aircraft carrier is simply intricate. Lots and lots of parts cleverly arranged, but it’s still a boat. Ditto the aircraft, and I’m a pilot with a romantic attachment to flying machines. They’re complex and subtle machines, but not awesome.
I’m not sure a nuclear device is really a machine <looking in dictionary> A structure consisting of a framework and various fixed and moving parts, for doing some kind of work; or any device thought of as opperating in souch a way, as in electronic computer.
Well it’s a stretch…
Can we have more things with real moving parts please 
The RealDoll? Now with real moving parts?
I’d have one, but I hear they’re a bitch to clean.
Oh, hell yes…I’m putting this baby on a pinup!
What? What are y’all looking at me like that for?
Armilla
I had no idea machines like that existed outside of sf. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
I’m surprised no one had mentioned the Monitor and Merrimack (aka the Virginia.) When the Confederates created the first ironclad out of the scuttled Northern ship Merrimack and renamed it the Virginia, the ship terrified the North.
The North thought it was going to sail up the Potomac and be unstoppable. To have the nation’s capital trembling in terror – now that is an awesome machine. And then came the Monitor, and ironclad that rode below the water and had a revolutionary gun turret. It was a fantastic piece of work. I’ve read somewhere on the remarkable number of patented devices that went into this truly revolutionary design.
And then the fact that the two ships met each other the very next day after the Virginia’s rampage – that’s just a piece of history that seems like fiction writers set it up.
And naval warfare was never the same.
If you want overall inventions rather than particular machines, I’d go with the boring old steam engine. Ho-hum today, but it launched the Industrial Revolution, having more impact than arguably any other device except the movable-type printing press.
OTOH, I just got a look at the Chrysler Crossfire, and decided that’s the most awesome machine every built.
Holy :eek:!
Twain blew a small fortune developing it! You can see one in the basement of his house in West Hartford, CT. It has something like 5200 moving parts!
In all seriousness, I do not think anyone has mentioned the multi-billion dollar International Space Station - probably one of the most complex machines in the solarsystem that we know of. To operate on such a high level of complexity and being non-terrestrial - I’d say it’s a sure bet.
Armilla that is just beautiful, if I were a hundred foot tall mechanoid I’d ask her out for a date.
Satisfying Andy Licious here is a link to a jpg of those two beauties http://www.historyroom.com/Monitor%20v%20Merrimack.jpg
Phlosphr good call…
