Ancient Technology

Post Reply New Topic

I am a fan of learning about Technology of the anicent world I found a good link about it tell me what you think.
http://www.aquiziam.com/ancient-technology.html

The Antikithera device is built along lines known to the Alexandrian inventor Heron and to the greatest of the classical mathematicians, Archimedes. It is on a par with a calculating machine built by Pascal in the 17th century. The only thing lacking to the ancients were optics and steam which came about in the 17th century (telescopes) and the 18th century (steam engines).

Humans have been very smart from the very beginning. The Greeks who built the Parthenon were using construction cranes, powered by human and animal muscle but built on the same principle as later steam driven cranes. The Chinese of the Tang dynasty were using water powered machines (gravity drop water wheels) and the Romans had such devices as early as the 9th century. Rome was in political and military decline but the machines were there. As early as 2000 b.c.e. the Babylonians were using base 60 arithmetic and were able to calculate square roots and cube roots even though they had no algebra (which was invented in the 8th or 9th century by Muslim mathematicians).

In terms of innate intelligence humans have been as smart as moderns going back ten thousand years.

The early folk were just as smart as we are. We just happen to know more because we are the inheritors of all that they knew plus new stuff we have found out recently. Knowledge is cumulative.

I will bet ancient Aspies made their contributions to civilization then even as they do now. The nerds, geeks, and Auties have been with us since there were modern humans.

ruveyn

Oh yes I believe the same thing I would have loved to live in those anicent times.

I will bet the nerds, geeks, and Auties have been with us since before there were modern humans.

the steam engine was far older than the 18th century we simply never learned to harness to work from the systems we had before, they were seen as curiosa

Heron's toy turbine does not count. It was never put to any substantial use. Also the condensation principles discovered by Watt were not know to Heron.

Mankind has been boiling water for thousands of years. Putting boiling water to substantial mechanical use only goes back to the late 18 th century.

ruveyn

The BBC just did a really good program on the antikythera mechanism, well worth watching if you like this sort of stuff.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... _Computer/


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojmb48M0wj8[/youtube]

Thanks for the link... I had missed the program.

The Antikythera mechanism is an amazing example of early clockwork. However, calling it a computer is much the same as calling an abacus a computer - true, but a little sensationalist.

(PS. I find SHOUTING tedious.)

The AK machine is as much a computer as any mechanical calculating machine.

I am old enough to remember hand cranked adding machines (operated by pulling a handle). They sometimes were called comptometers. In the original use of the term "computer", it referred to a human being who did calculations according to an algorithm or script. During the Manhattan Program most computations were done by rooms full of women calculating according to a script and passing on the result of their work to people next to them. In the beginning what we now called computers were called electronic calculating machines to distinguish them from electric motor powered mechanical calculating machines like the Frieden (tm). It was as noisy as the dickens (clack, clack, clack, whine, grind) but it carried up to 12 decimal places of accuracy.

The machines gears had more teeth than the lion house at the Bronx Zoo.

ruveyn

True, and a lot will be lost this time around once civilization goes road warrior.

Let's hope that doesn't happen. At least not any time soon.

In my first paid job, I used exactly such a device. (A somewhat sad job - in that it was sending demanding pro forma letters to people who could not pay their mail order bills.)

However, language moves on with the times. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37975

When I first saw the thread title, I thought it was about 56k modems. This is much more interesting, though. I've always been interested with ancient feats of engineering. I've seen some dolmens in Drenthe, and it amazes me that a society constantly looking for ways to survive was willing to spend time and effort into building burial chambers out of large, extremely-heavy stones. There is a museum that once had an activity in which you could safely try to transport one of those stones, and it took several grown men, smooth logs that had to be relocated over and over and a lever to do so.

Now, dolmens are much easier to believe than flying devices, as they've been sticking out of the ground there for several milennia after the accompanying burial mounds were washed away or dug away by looters. What I found a wrongful assumption by that website was that they dismissed that logic as a fallacy. "Because we haven't found something doesn't mean it doesn't exist" is a good concept, but when they're the ones making the claim that these things did exist, it's almost a crime not to ask them to back it up with something beyond misinterpreted hieroglyphs and religious myths handed down through Sanskrit texts.

I really like out of place artifacts and theories surrounding them. Keep it coming - this website was very interesting.

I wonder where we'd be if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed. Posting a PPR thread on a similar note shortly.

Most likely we would not exist as history would have unfolded in a much different manner and the events leading men and women to meet and mate would have been far different.

ruveyn

Yes. The cities and countries would be very different too. Even technology would be different.