Apple chap knocks up ancient Lego computer Apple software engineer Andrew Carol has rather impressively put together a replica of the ancient Antikythera Mechanism - built entirely from Lego. The Antikythera Mechanism. Photos: X-Tek The mechanism, constructed around 80BC, was recovered from the wreck of a cargo ship off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, but …
All that lego looked to be of the original kind from around the time when technical lego was first released, none of that modern crappy 'ben 10' shite.
Thats the best purist lego thing I've seen in ages. But then there is also the classic lego printer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY which if we are honest, we all want to own!
Not quite - those are the second version of the differential housings which were only phased out last year; the blue axle-pins make it more recent, and you're probably going to have a fit when I point out that practically none of those black structural beams have studs on...
Still, let's see the Reg do it with Playmobil.
No one is going to come up with something like that from first principals, so there must have been predecessors. They were perhaps made from hardwood, however, since that's what larger geared mechanisms, in Babylonia and Greece at the time, were often made from, so they maybe won't have survived.
The interesting thing is that with those straight-cut teeth the original must have been a bit of a bitch to turn over: nothing like as smooth as the Lego one. So whoever made it was a sight better at maths, than they were at engineering.
That made my day! It's a long time since I have seen such workmanship. Reminds me of some of the apprentice pieces made at the Swindon railway works.
Some of the photographs are so clean, edges so sharp and straight, that for a moment I thought they might be 3D renderings.
In an age where everything is mass produced and ephemeral such work stands out as a reminder that the latest gadget has a mayfly's lifespan but true craftsmanship is forever.
She really should be better known.
Actually, I believe it already had. The original machine tracked the movement of the heavenly bodies through the sky, but modelled with the Earth as the centre, meaning that planets would stop part way across the sky and then turn round and head off the other direction! IIRC Mars' path is particularly impressive.
To my mind this is even more impressive than the astrologically accurate Lego version!
The ancient Greeks knew how to build steam engines - but why
bother when you've got slaves to do the work? The Anitkythera
mechanism seems to have been a toy for the amusement of
nobility rather than a practical device for the everyday world of
commerce and trade. The Greeks were also
stymied by an unbelievably clumsy way of writing numbers.
And the military dictatorship that was Rome had little time for anything
that wasn't immediately practical.
None of these problems were related to their religious beliefs however.
It should be noticed by those who enjoy knocking the effect of religion
on scientific development that modern science was born and grew up
in a very specifically Christian environment. This may be a pure
coincidence of course.
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