UKH

I have known about the Antikythera Mechanism for many years but have just rewatched some of the fantastic YouTube videos about it. It is such a wondrous artefact and so far ahead of it's time. 

 This and the story about solving Fermat's Last Theorum and also the tale about the race to create a way of calculating Longitude at sea have managed to really capture my interest with the mixture of the seemingly impossible alongside science, maths and detective work.

Does anyone know of any other similar stories?

The Antikythera Mechanism typifies to me how ingenious humans have been right through the ages. It enrages me whenever I hear something like 'Ancient Astronaut Theorists believe ... ' This bolleaux just completely trashes past human achievement and the rigour required to understand how it was arrived at. Then again, Stonehenge does look like a UFO docking station ...

Ancient Greek steam engines, possible Babylonian batteries - so many inventions could have started a scientific and industrial revolution 2,000 years ago.  

"The Hut Six Story" by Gordon Welchman may be the book you are looking for? It's a biography of his Bletchley Park years about  Enigma and other stuff.

What's unusual compared to a lot of the historical whatnot is he gives a really clearly and accessible description of how Enigma was decrypted at different points in the way and how Bombe worked and the diagonal board and analogue computing. A really good fundamental explanation of it all. Unfortunately what Welchman didn't know (the next stuff I'm saying wasn't known to him and not in the book) was that until the Berlin wall fell the East Germans used an Enigma direct derivative machine cypher and after the partitioning of India UK gave a load of cypher machines to India, the Indians suspected UK could decrypt stuff but knew that Pakistan and China couldn't so it was used by them for an astonishing long time for lesser secret info. What the UK didn't want was a really clear explanation of Bletchley Park and it's methods (must give credit to Polish mathematicians too) to be out in the open even in early 90s when he started this book. There was still some relevance then. Worse still this book gives really clear explanation of the foundations of what I'd call meta data analysis but he calls traffic analysis, in fact I first read this book for professional reasons. It may be illuminative for understanding things like ECHELON and some of the Edward Snowden discussion.

This book was never approved. He eventually got his book published but although in Canada they had no legal power to stop it they very nastily got revenge and had him discredited sacked and generally ruined. Terrible story how they treated him.

Also, Turing worked on a stream cypher "telex" system codenamed tunny and some Naval Enigma but contrary to popular opinion he did very very little work on standard Enigma. Tommy Flowers is credited for his work in the book... Genius. Pleased to say the IET in London have a meeting/reception room named after him and an plaque mentioning his pioneering work, but no mention of the war!

Anyhow a very well written book book by a likeable and interesting author, with good explanations of a lot of stuff if you are mathematically minded.

Have you come across the stuff about an ancient civilisation thought to have died out at the last ice age along with all their technology ? I think someone called Hancock pushes the theory. There is a series called Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix at present I think. His arguments are intriguing and stuff like the Antikythera might fit in with it. Then again the scientific community dont like it.

I have come across the documentary about Tommy Flowers before though not the book you recommend. Will definitely give it a go. Thanks.

Hancock is a charlatan in the same nut job league as Von Daniken. If mammoths (who, as far as I know didn't build cities) are found abundantly all over their range then an advanced 'Ice Age' civilization would be common knowledge. I stopped giving this sort of pseudo science any cred when I was 14. There's legitimate speculation and there's sensation based on misinformation and lies to sell books and TV series to the gullible.

I was in the Museum in Munich, and there as a large section on Coal Mining, mainly open cast with models of the huge industrial machines that are used in the process. But what struck me most was a small diorama of ancient people digging for coal.
They had dug and Adit shaft, with a a vertical shaft leading to a fire. They had apparently discovered that people going down unventilated Adit shafts had suffered from CO2 or maybe CO1 ¯_(ツ)_/¯ , and had discovered that by digging the vertical shaft and lighting the fire at the top, they could create an airflow, which would mean they could mine in relative safety.
This has always amazed me. These people had no education or books to draw on, how did they discover to do this.
This really rammed home to me that these people where just like me, at least as intelligent with the same emotions and everything. 
The German Alpine Club Museum in Munich is also worth a visit.

I can add a couple of books here:

'A Computer called LEO' by Georgina Ferry, which describes in fascinating detail the world-leading development of the Lyons Tea Shops business computer in the late 40s and early 50s, including detailed descriptions of the hardware (mostly designed by Flowers) and the software development process, which was as good if not better than the early NASA efforts. Their computer division eventually became ICL, and shortly afterwards the Yanks overtook us, unfortunately.

More generally, there is a great history of the early development of weather forecasting, including an intrepid ascent to 10,000m by two researchers in a weather balloon - without oxygen as they didn't know it would be necessary. 'The Weather Experiment' by Peter Moore.

In prehistory knowledge was either garnered from past generations via your mum or dad showing what they did. Or, like every generation, an innovator comes up with a great new idea. All that's different today is the technology and relative speed of change. Can you imagine the first inventor of beer demonstrating his fantastic new thing to the tribe?

Yeah I agree but it did provide avenues onto legitimately fascinating finds, like Gobekli Tepe.

The story of Alexander Thom, and his research on ancient stone circles as "megalithic lunar observatories"
Thom's work is widely discredited by the archaeological establishment but I find it compelling.

I think the Antikythera mechanism is a reminder of what a fascinating and little understood time and place the Mediterranean Hellenic world was - i.e. that period between the break-up of Alexander's empire in 323 BC to the final conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt by the Romans in 30 BC.  It seems to have been a time of great scientific and technological innovation.  There was Eratosthenes, not only showing that the Earth was spherical but also coming up with a pretty accurate value for its radius (within 16% of the actual value), Archimedes developing hydrostatics, some of the mathematics that's a precursor to calculus, and a bunch of practical inventions.  And, as the Antikythera mechanism shows, they had a pretty good understanding of gearing (including right angle gearing, probably invented then too).  One wonders what other knowledge was lost when the Library of Alexandria (which was probably not just a library, but the nearest thing the ancient world had to a research institute) was burnt down, and the Romans (good at civil engineering & military technology, but otherwise a bunch of thugs) took over.

I think the early history of computing is fascinating.  I had a few days in Berlin in the summer, and visited the marvellous Deutsche Technikmuseum.  A highlight of that was a reconstruction of Konrad Zuse's programmable computer from 1938, the Z1.  Entirely mechanical, with logic gates cut in sheet metal.  It didn't work very well because the plates and rods tended to stick, but Zuse later designed electromechanical analogues.

Of course, everyone should know that the first stored programme computer was designed and built in Manchester by Freddy Williams and Tom Kilburn, and commercialised by Ferranti.  There's a lovely quote from Freddy Williams about how this happened:

"We knew nothing about computers but a lot about circuits.  Professor Newman and Mr A.M. Turing in the Mathematics Department knew a lot about computers and substantially nothing about electronics.  They took us by the hand and explained how numbers could live in houses with addresses and how if they did they could be kept track of during a calculation.  In addition, Professor Newman had a grant from the Royal Society.  The collaboration was fruitful."

By applying what we know as the scientific method: observation, hypothesis, experiment.

Metallurgy and ceramics by observing that, sometimes, odd things were found in a cooking fire. Soap, by noticing that fat dripping into wood ash, used to clean out a pot, made work much easier.

And yes, it shows that all modern humans were as intelligent as we are.

Re the 'bunch of thugs' taking over. See Eckstein Mediterranean Anarchies. It was a dog eat dog world, everyone was brutish including the Hellenistic city states that were producing things like the Antikythera Mechanism. Warfare was a fairly normal state of existence and in some of these city states building bigger and more destructive war machines led to a bit of an arms race at times. I'm not going to deny that the Romans weren't particularly good at war and brutality (the latter something of a specialism of mine), but would resist the temptation to see a simplistic sequence of events like 'scientific advancement smashed by brutal Romans'.

Agree with the critique of Hancock, btw, to describe his stuff as 'deeply problematic' would be quite a significant understatement.

Of course you're right, the Alexandrian successor kingdoms and states were themselves brutal autocracies - and indeed Archimedes himself was famously supported by one of those autocrats precisely because he could help him build better war machines.  But I do think there are a couple of interesting questions here.  

Why did this Hellenic world seem to be so much more fruitful at producing new technologies and significant proto-scientific knowledge than the Romans who came after?  Who are the famous Roman inventors & scientists?  Pliny I suppose for natural history, Ptolemy was in principle Roman but as an Alexandrian Greek maybe better thought of as a late flowering of that Hellenic world.  Maybe the competing world of independent kingdoms and city states was more conducive to invention and inventors than a monolithic empire - people sometimes make this argument about why early modern Europe produced a rapid advance in technology.

And why is this Hellenic world so little known?  It seems to me that popular understanding of the ancient world jumps straight from Classical Greece to the later Roman Republic as if the intervening centuries didn't happen.  Maybe there's also something about the fact that the knowledge behind such things as the Antikythera mechanism wasn't written down or valued, as a result of the lesser value placed on techne vs episteme.  

Sometimes I imagine Hero taking his little steam engine to different wealthy land owners and excitedly talking about how it could transform agriculture, only for the land owner to point out over their fields of toiling slaves, asking what need have they for a fancy machine?  A total flight of fancy on my behalf, but also a bit of a parable for automation in the life sciences vs labs of toiling PhD students...

Perhaps if Hero had shown how it could be used to kill lots of people more efficiently? War has often been the spur to invention throughout the ages.

I think the point about Hero's embryonic steam engine was that it used the expansion power of water when turned into steam.  But the key feature of the first practical steam engines was that they used atmospheric pressure to do work against the partial vacuum formed when steam condensed.  A high pressure steam engine - that takes power from the expansion of steam - needs much better mechanical engineering than the ancients had, or was possible until the early 19th century.

On lab automation, there may soon be another way, if this work from Liverpool progresses...

https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2020/07/10/your-new-lab-partner-a-mobile-robot...

Indeed, it was only ever a trinket and as an expansion driven turbine, whole fields of materials science, precision engineering, lubrication and so on were missing to make anything practical from it.

But as a proof of concept, that heat could be turned in to mechanical work, and with the burgeoning capabilities of the era, they were perhaps one inquisitive polymath away from starting the power revolution 1,500 years sooner.   They also had a hydraulic cylinder pump with non return valves.  So close, and then the moment in time passed. 

I still blame the Romans (whatever Kate says!).  I think your more general point is the correct one, though, slave societies have no incentive to improve labour productivity.

the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillary_sphere is pretty cool, esp Zhang's water-powered one.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Heng (see also his seismoscope)

Yeah! Romanes eunt domus!

Not quite as advanced but Skara Brae? 

It fascinates me that 5000 years ago interior design and the layout of everyday houses wasn't so different to 2022!

re slave societies - agree with you, we used to do an open day talk called 'why the Romans never invented the wheelbarrow' which was essentially about slave-owning societies potentially lacking incentive to invent loads of labour-saving devices.

Though it's not just to do with slave societies. Suetonius reports that Vespasian refused to use a means of transporting huge columns at a small expense that an engineer had developed (presumably through some mechanism) because the emperor had to be allowed to feed his people, (ie: they had to be able to earn a living as labourers on huge imperial building projects in Rome, so these are free people) though he did give the engineer a big reward (Suet Vespasian 18). 

On the Hellenistic period not being cool like the Classical Greek, Roman Republic and esp, Roman Empire, I think it's very much a 'popular' perception. Our students really like the Hellenistic period and I can see their fascination (though don't share it - I'm very much a Romanist and my interest in the Hellenistic tends to focus more on the Romans beating up Hellenistic city states). My feeling is that popular interest in the ancient world tends to fade with Alexander, and then pop up with Hannibal and then the big Roman conquests and civil wars of the late Republic with Julius Caesar, and then the empire. There perhaps aren't so many of the 'big men' that make some of these other periods more graspable in the popular imagination and sadly war tends to sell better than scientific advancements!

There has always been huge opposition to anything that is not the current trend.   Advancement is often about managing to break through that, rather than coming up with the idea.

And what have the Romans done on grit?

They built a wall out of Whin Sill.  I like to think of some bored soldiers showing off to each other at Peel Crag two millennia ago.  Perhaps one of the resident Roman experts can give an assessment of the highest grade that could be climbed on dry whin sill in Roman footwear…

Via Principia (S 4a)

In old skool hobnail sandals, too...

I heard from somewhere I can't remember that they reckon humans peaked in average intelligence around 15,000 years ago and its been downhill ever since thanks to technological advancement and modern living. No idea how they came up with that though of what their definition of intelligence was...

I bet 15,000 years ago there were loads of people who knew everything, or nearly everything there was to know.

These days most people hardly know anything!

😉

I'm not onboard with that idea; certainly not the 'technology' effect. We have to be able to use remarkably sophisticated technology, rather than just flint tools and fire. It's just that we & they fill our brains with different stuff, and solve different problems. Same brain structure, same memory system, same level of intelligence, just applied to different things. Theirs was rather more applied to survival and the real world, though there was a phase of cave painting, which suggests development of abstract thinking and possibly belief systems.

I suppose 15,000 years ago very few people got looked after.  Old, sick, hungry, weak, stupid, or just not paying attention,  and you were dead.   Thanks to technological advancement and modern living the least intelligent,  demented,  and even the brain dead can survive.   So average intelligence would have been higher then.

Perhaps not. There's a fascinating episode in Sallust's account of the Jugurthine War where a Ligurian serving in the Roman army finds a way into the enemy stronghold by rock climbing (he was initially collecting snails for dinner), and led in a raiding party. The account says that the soldiers took their hobnail sandals off in order to climb the rock more easily. They also took their helmets off to make things easier (they would have been bronze or iron!). "The Ligurian led the way, fastening ropes to the rocks or to old projecting roots, in order that with such help the soldiers might more easily make the ascent" so I guess he's one of the first recorded mountain guides.

You can read about it here, sections 93-94
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Sallust/Bellum_Jugurthin...

Have you been watching too much Game of Thrones...?

Well, everyone knows that the 'Battle of the Bastards' was essentially Cannae recast!

You could try Robert Ludlum?

Several of them survived and now post on UKC!