Ancient Greeks built a bronze computer to track the movement of the stars
The Antikythera mechanism, a 2,000-year-old Greek device, used a complex system of 30 bronze gears to predict eclipses and the irregular orbits of the moon.
Recovered from a shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek analog computer dating to roughly 150 BC. It utilized over 30 hand-cut bronze gears to model the cosmos with startling accuracy. The most sophisticated component was an epicyclic gear train—a 'gear within a gear'—that simulated the moon’s varying speed as it moved through its elliptical orbit, a concept not rediscovered in Europe for another 1,500 years.
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