What Ancient Tech Do You Do?

neonfrog asks: "Before silicon, before electricity even, what the heck did those of us with geek brains do? Our brains have not evolved appreciably in half an eon (at least mine hasn't, but I may be descended from turtles). What would today's programmers have been doing centuries before the invention of the keyboard? What would an electrical engineer be doing a millennia or three before the concept of resistors and capacitors? What piqued their curiosity? Were their skills esoteric or exotic? They can't all have been Leonardo Da Vincis or court 'magicians', right? Summer's starting and, for some, it's hobby time. I bet the Slashdot community harbors quite a few Journeyman, or even Masters. I know a lot of geeks are beer-makers (and I do so appreciate you folk ... urp!) so there's no danger of that knowledge getting lost. What other ancient tech do you indulge in and keep alive? What are some good resources?"

Comments

80 BC: The Antikythera celestial navigation device

[obiwan2u]

What were engineers doing over 2k years ago? How about building the Antikythera Mechanism (web copy of a June 1959 Scientific American article, p60-7)

An amazingly complex, intricate, and accurate mechanical astronomical calculation device from 80 BC. Found in a shipwreck in 1900, and not fully reverse engineered until 1973, there are no other examples of this level technology in the ancient world.

"It is hard to exaggerate the singularity of this device, or its importance in forcing a complete re-evaluation of what had been believed about technology in the ancient world. For this box contained some 32 [brass] gears, assembled into a mechanism that accurately reproduced the motion of the sun and the moon against the background of fixed stars, with a differential [gear] giving their relative position and hence the phases of the moon."

You can see a reconstructed version of the Antikythera Mechanism here. Another article detailing the probable creation date of the device based on the construction of the gears can be found here"

..it was more sophisticated than anything like it until the Eighteenth Century, nearly two thousand years later!"

Another article makes the conjecture that ancient navigators could have used the Antikythera Mechanism to determine longitude via the position of the moon (1800 years before longitude calculation was perfected in England)

Ben in DC