The Mystery of the World‘s First Computer

a merchant ship is on its way to Rome it is loaded to the brim with treasure just past Creek it gets into a heavy storm the 300 tons of cargo make it very heavy possibly too heavy the ship sinks [Music] history became legend legend became myth and for over 2,000 years the ship passed out of all knowledge perhaps it would have been forgotten forever swallowed by the Sea like so many ships before it that was until a sponge diver from a small town of Simi makes a dive into the ocean on the sea floor he

discovers a bronze hand sticking out of the mud heavily corroded but still recognizable he reports his findings to his captain with the help of the Greek government the crew recovers what must have been a shipwreck ancient bronze and marble statues fragmented pots and bases it's the largest collection of Greek artifacts ever found they take everything to Athens Museum staff are piecing together the artifacts meanwhile this corroded lump of bronze still sits there unnoticed over the course of the next few months it dries up and cracks open the shattered Rock reveals something very strange a large

wheel engraved letters and a number of smaller gears it looks like an ancient machine a sophisticated device that simply should not exist with a mechanism over a thousand years ahead of its time for over a century archaeologist engineers and physicists from all over the world will try to solve the riddle of the world's first computer this video is largely based on the Fantastic book decoding the heavens by Joe Marchant Link in the description Greek archaeologist Valerio sty is the first person to examine the strange objects the many traces of Gears lead him to believe that

this must be some kind of ancient clock but mechanical clocks were not invented until the Renaissance 1,400 years later and when while there are mentions of tooth Wheels no gears from Antiquity has ever been found before at least until now sty soon realizes that he needs the expertise of others he invites John Soros and Adolf Wilhelm both experts in ancient text they decipher the scribblings as ancient Greek letters another scientist named Pericles rtis studies the inscriptions and suggest that they must be operating instructions this word in particular stands out to him it's an old an

unusual word for the Zodiac scale a scale dividing the year in 12 zodiac constellations Rus and Soros conclude that the device must be an astrolabe an ancient calculator to measure the position of stars and planets but traditionally astrolabes don't need gears Maybe This Strange astap was somehow able to determine the position of stars mechanically in the following years the fragments are carefully cleaned Albert REM an expert from ancient languages from Germany travels to Athens to inspect a device he discovers another word previously hidden an ancient Egyptian month in Greek letters what if REM argues this

machine is able to simulate the movement of celestial objects throughout the year shortly after his Discovery work on the antitha mechanism stalls years pass without any new major breakthroughs two world wars hamper the excitement the machine survives at the bottom of some store room crates in danger of being forgotten again computer technology has come a long way today we don't just study stars or track time mechanically we can now access and control our most powerful tools from halfway across the world this is possible because of services like our sponsor nesk nesk is a free lightning

fast tool that lets you access all of your devices remotely whether you're making complex 3D animations on your laptop from the the coast of Greece or just helping a family member troubleshoot Tech issues any desk is here to help with reliable and secure connections even in low bandwidth situations the clean interface makes any desk of Breeze for anyone to use it's available for all platforms from your laptop into your phone all the way to your grandmother's Windows XP machine if the antio mechanism would have had an internet connection maybe it could have run any desk

as well if you want to check out what nides has to offer go to nid desk.com Fern and try it for free fast forward to 1953 a new generation of divers is in the waters near anira among them Shak custo filmmaker and Pioneer thanks to him diving gear went from this to this divers can go much deeper now there are many stories of treasures that fell over the cliff beneath the recite they were out of reach for the sponge divers back then but not for custo and his crew after days of searching they find something

buried under a thick layer of sand the sunken ship's hole almost perfectly preserved but the crew does not have the necessary equipment to unearth it they return two decades later with better gear and a camera the crew finds more treasure but no new parts from the mechanism luckily science itself is developing rapidly Derek price a historian from the UK uses newly developed x-ray technology to scan the existing fragments he finds more gears and is able to build the first model of the antitha mechanism he calls it a calendar computer but his model isn't very accurate

for it to work price had to change the number of teeth on the gears despite his x-ray images showing otherwise the researchers Michael Wright and Alan Bramley see that price clearly made some mistakes so they decide to solve the mechanism themselves the two fly to Athens for a month they reexamine measure and photograph the 82 remaining pieces of the device but after 2,000 years and likely passing through as many hands the inevitable happens maybe an x-ray was the right call after all the two learn of a relatively new technique called tomography it basically works by

taking multiple slices of pictures from an object and putting them together afterwards they take a total of 700 images with them they can have a clear look at the inside after after years of work Wright and Bramley are this close to unraveling the mystery but suddenly Bramley Cuts ties with Wright he thinks right for his work takes the images and leaves a few years later Bramley is diagnosed with cancer on his deathbed he confesses to WR he alone wanted to be known for solving the antitha mechanism but he failed in the end Bry hands over

his 3D scans to Wright Wright had already designed a prototype in 2002 but with these images he would be finally able to solve the device or so he thought Tony free a mathematician and filmmaker gathers a group of researchers under the anic era mechanism research project the group scans and measures the fragments yet again this time with even better and newer technology the quality of their images is astonishing even the smallest inscriptions hidden deep within the stone are now readable in sharp detail they regularly publish new papers of the device there are few more expeditions

to the Shipwreck with drastically changed diving gear but again no one can find New pieces of the mechanism on the seabed in 2021 free and the others are finally able to put together all the pieces of the puzzle they are able to combine all the evidence of the last century in one machine The Mystery of the world's oldest computer is finally solved so what does it do a computer is a device that can store and process information any device that is able to solve math equations and show you the result can therefore technically be considered

a computer there are two types digital computers like the phone you're watching this video on and analog ones so you have this task 8 * 2 digital computers work with ones and zeros to solve the task it first needs to translate the numbers in binary 1 0 * 0 1 0 one way to multiply the numbers would just be to multiply the individual numbers one by one and add the individual results just like in school translate the number back to decimal and there's your result but there is also another way the same task can be

represented by an analog computer with gears this can be translated into one Gear with eight teeth and a larger one with 16 each time you turn the larger gear once the smaller one turns twice mathematically speaking your input has been multiplied by two this is basically what clocks do transforming seconds into minutes and minutes into hours and this is also what the anthura mechanism does only that it's much more complex the device originally sat in this wooden box it had a handle on the side to control the complex internal mechanism these gears move a series

of pointers at the front and back back the ancient Greeks believed the Earth was at the center of the universe that's why Earth sits right in the middle around it orbits the moon as well as the sun and the five planets that were known at the time there are also rings for the Egyptian months and dates with its respective zodiac Additionally the front is full with step-by-step instructions on how to use it the back shows two spiral rings with large pointers in the middle the upper one shows the 19-year matonic cycle it's the basis for

many an ancient calendars inside these Rings is a smaller scale showing the 4-year cycle of the Olympic Games the lower ring is an eclipse predictor that well predicts eclipses the antitha mechanism is a complex simulation of the cosmos pick any day the machine shows you where the moon stood which Star constellation was rising or when the next eclipse was coming all this in a wooden case as large as a book perhaps it was used by astronomers or by teachers but one common the suggests otherwise it most likely wasn't a tool it was probably a luxury

toy a very impressive and also very expensive piece of tech for anyone who can afford it some suggest it might have been used to cast horoscopes the ancient Greeks like strangely many people today believed in astrology the idea that the position of the stars and planets at your birth have an influence on your life say you want to know what Mercury was doing when you were born today you just Google it in ancient Greece you need an astronomer at the time of your birth to write down the exact constellations otherwise this information would be lost

with the antitha mechanism you could set it to your birthday only to realize that mercury was in retrograde over 2,000 years ago some wealthy owner took the device with him on a trip to Rome but he never reached his goal the antitha mechanism is a technological Masterpiece that no one would have thought possible at the time there is a slight catch however the device actually sucked it wasn't very accurate ancient Greeks didn't have the scientific tools to measure the universe like we do they mostly looked up at the sky for a very long time wrote

down what they saw and develop theories about the universe when you look up at Mercury long enough you realize something very strange at first Mercury becomes slower and slower until suddenly it changes Direction and seems to move backwards but the way this is actually what people are talking about when they say Mercury is in retrograde which is a bad sign apparently or whatever in fact every planet has these little Loops called epicycles if you write it all down this is what the geocentric Universe looks [Music] like thanks to cernus we know that the universe is

heliocentric these epicycles are only an optical illusion this is what the two models look like side by side translating the geocentric model into the right gears is an incredibly difficult task sure you can calculate it but the model is very prone to error every gear needs to accurately simulate the different speeds of the planets during these epicycles and even the apparent retrograde motion this is why the inside of the antier mechanism is so mind boogly complex building a machine like this without modern technology also adds mechanical errors ultimately the antier mechanism is off by about

one whole zodiac considering the age of the machine that is of course still incredibly [Music] impressive for a long time historians believ that the ancient Greeks were talented but not very practically minded philosophy yes pretty sculptures sure but building a space computer out of Gears absolutely impossible but they somehow did the tiic mechanism is so unbelievable that some people believe it actually came from Aliens and was used by them to navigate the stars for others it is an ancient time machine and plot device in a Hollywood movie fact is the antiac mechanism is real and

it most likely wasn't even the first of its kind several ancient texts mention a device designed by Archimedes a sphere that shows the motion of the sun moon and planets around the Earth but it was lost the bronze inside the Machinery melted into coins in a weird since we might be lucky that the merchant ship sank during that storm 2,000 years ago [Music]