What is interesting to me is that he shows that the craftsman that fabricated it were familiar with the techniques. This was not a one off wonder device. Numerous copies were probably made and they’re buried somewhere just waiting to be discovered. This is the level of skill that was lost during the dark ages and then rediscovered afterwards.
It probably was. Mind you the craftsman probably made more than one of that type of thing, but each would have been to order for the customer, and designed to the needs and budget of the customer. Want a different calendar - no problem at all. Want to skip the phases of the moon - that will save you some money. Want to add something else - just a bit more cash.
This was made by a master craftsman, but in there wouldn't have been a large number of people who could afford such a thing. It is possible the craftsman was paid to never made another so the buyer can show off something unique.
It wouldn’t have been very customizable. The mechanism uses gear trains with shared gears. The are physical constraints to what gear ratios work in addition to the constraint of integer tooth counts. The interdependency is inherent to the design.
But gear tooth counts are easy to change for a different ratio. This was not mass produced, everything was made to fit this machine. So the shared gears can change within the limits.
> It is possible the craftsman was paid to never made another so the buyer can show off something unique.
It's possible that Facebook will ring me today to make me VP of R&D and pay me $5m a year. But I have no reason to believe that is so, and nor do you, and nor does anyone about the craftsman who made the Antikythera Mechanism! There is no reason to believe that the thing was customized from a menu of functionality - it's just as likely that a machine like this was the tool of a navigator or sea captain and one of a hand made, very expensive, but standard type. Rather like a marine chronometer would have been in the 16th Century. I could argue that it's much more likely because we found the thing on a ship and so on - but there is just no evidence either way really.
On the other hand we do have references to similar machines, autonoma and so on, in ancient sources. So it certainly wasn't completely unique. The interesting thing to me is that it doesn't seem that this was translated into clock making.
I don't see how religious zealotry had anything to do with it. I presume you'r referring to Christianity.
This device originated some time in the second or first century BC, half a millennium before the ascendancy of Christianity, so we can't blame the lack of evidence of any successor devices during that period on religion.
The next time we see similarly sophisticated devices in Europe is the early 14th century, in the form of astronomical clocks such as those made by Richard of Wallingford in the 1330s. That's at the height of the ascendency of the Catholic church, and several hundred years before the reformation got under way.
You make solid points. I was thinking of the destruction of the library of Alexandria which I came to learn just recently was more a centuries long decline rather than a tear down by angry religious fanatics.
Or cultural prejudice and ignorance - the skills and ideas were likely retained in the middle east and used to build many of the mechanisms that were made to grace Mosques and palaces there - later to be ignored by scholars and historians alike.
