0:00

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from

0:03

House Stuff Works dot com.

0:10

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh

0:12

Clark, just Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So

0:15

this is the stuff you should know the podcast.

0:19

Yes, indeed, Um,

0:23

you know, archaeology was the first word,

0:25

first big word I could spell early,

0:28

because like two weeks old when

0:30

you're spelling archaeology. Yeah, I couldn't

0:33

spell anything else for years and years,

0:35

but I could spell archaeology. I love archaeology.

0:38

Yeah, me too. It's one of my favorite things actually

0:40

too, although I didn't list

0:42

that when I was asked what my favorite things were in that one

0:44

listener mail, and still it's up there. Um,

0:49

but you too, huh oh yeah, starting

0:52

with uh, well, starting with Indiana

0:54

Jones. Yeah, that definitely helps that

0:57

that we were alive and at the right age

0:59

when those came out. Um,

1:02

well, Chuck, there's a ship. It's

1:04

an unnamed ship as far as I know, that

1:07

went down in the g and c

1:10

off the coast of a tiny, teeny

1:12

little spit of land called Anti

1:15

Cathera in Greece, in between

1:17

Crete and the Greek mainland, I believe, and

1:20

um in nineteen o one or nine hundred

1:23

it was discovered and it actually ended up

1:25

giving birth to the field of um

1:27

marine archaeology. Actually it was the

1:29

first shipwreck that was ever excavated

1:32

archaeologically. Yeah, I think I wrote

1:34

an article on that way back in the day.

1:37

Underwater archaeology. It's

1:39

a very tricky, I

1:41

would imagine, so because most of the stuff

1:44

you find is falling apart, Like

1:46

the second you take it out of water, it

1:48

starts falling apart. Right, So they've gotten

1:50

really good now and imagine they were not as

1:52

good about it in nineteen hundreds about

1:54

bringing stuff up still in water, yeah,

1:57

and transporting in water, same

1:59

sea water, display it in water to

2:02

uh well know then they start poking around

2:06

in yeah, right

2:09

water. Yeah, with the water. It's

2:11

pretty sensible. Um

2:14

I could have come up with that, I think with

2:17

that method. Yeah, good

2:19

for you. Um well, So

2:21

okay, anyway, this shipwreck that

2:24

was discovered in discovered actually

2:26

by accident, right. Yeah.

2:28

There was some sponge divers. You

2:30

know, sponge diving. It's a big deal.

2:33

Apparently it wasn't Greece. It was.

2:36

That's where you had to get sponges back in the day.

2:39

Uh is in the ocean,

2:41

and they were the sponge divers who they

2:43

actually got blown off course by a bad storm

2:45

and ended up in that lovely part

2:47

of town, and they said,

2:49

boy, this is great, let's just dive here. One

2:52

guy dove down, came back

2:54

up and there. They weren't free diving at this point,

2:57

and actually had you can listen to her well, it wasn't

2:59

a diving bell, but underwater

3:01

breathing apparatus is. At this point. He

3:04

came back and he's like, oh my god, they're

3:06

dead horses and dead men everywhere.

3:09

Yeah, and the boss is like, I

3:11

don't know about that. Let me go dive down there. He

3:14

dives down and comes up with a bronze

3:17

hand and says, you big dummy. They

3:19

smacked the guy over the head with it. It's a statue,

3:21

a bunch of statues down there decomposing.

3:24

And then he went, wait, why are there a bunch of statues

3:26

down there? And they they

3:29

said, well, let's figure out, let's remember

3:31

where the spot is and we'll just head off to North

3:33

Africa and do our sponge diving like we were

3:36

going to initially. Yeah, they still have to make some

3:38

dough, right, But when they came back, they took

3:40

the bronze arm and the location

3:42

of the ship to the Greek government.

3:45

And the Greek government said, you know what, this

3:48

could be a big deal. We

3:50

have a lot of antiquities out there

3:52

under the sea and this might be some

3:54

sort of treasure troups. So they hired these sponge

3:56

divers to go back and excavate

3:59

this place, and they found some pretty

4:01

amazing stuff. In addition to the bronze arm,

4:03

they found all sorts of marble statues. Um.

4:07

They found a bronze statue of

4:09

a young athlete. I

4:11

think it was like six ft tall, a little bigger

4:13

than life is what they call it. Um

4:16

they found a bust of a cynic,

4:18

a philosopher, a very detailed

4:20

lifelike bust that's really neat. And um

4:23

that was the guy whose arm. That was his arm,

4:25

Oh, it was his arm. Okay.

4:27

Um. And they found all manner

4:29

of stuff, some really cool stuff and

4:32

brought it up and they displayed it in the museum.

4:34

And among this trove, um

4:36

there was a greatly overlooked

4:39

item item number one five zero

4:41

eight seven. And um,

4:43

it was this weird kind of

4:46

it looked almost like a kind of a clock face

4:48

in a wooden frame and no

4:50

one knew what it was, and compared to the

4:53

amazing art that had been brought

4:55

up, it looked like a pile of garbage

4:58

basically, So they just piled

5:00

it away um and it languished

5:02

for a while until it was um

5:05

kind of rediscovered again. Yeah, and

5:07

giving credit where credit is due. The Sponge

5:11

Team captain, I think that's

5:13

what they called themselves. He was captain,

5:16

Yeah, Sponge Team Captain,

5:18

Demetrius Kantos. And

5:21

then the cry baby who dove

5:23

down there and thought he saw dead people was

5:25

Elias Stadiatus. And

5:28

if there's one thing I love, it's Greek

5:30

names. Love

5:33

the names. Do you like those as much

5:35

as archaeology? Greek

5:38

archaeologists that you're pretty much flying

5:40

in the upper atmosphere for me. Uh

5:44

So those were the dudes that led the Sponge team, and

5:46

all those antiquities, they're scattered

5:48

about a little bit, but most of them are in the National Archaeological

5:51

Museum in Athens, Greece. Uh

5:54

and also some in Switzerland, oddly

5:56

enough, and then some more in a different museum

5:58

of underwater antiquity in Greece. And

6:00

the reason the Greeks went to this trouble

6:03

and didn't just say whatever.

6:05

Who cares about a bronze arm. Apparently

6:07

they'd been defeated recently

6:09

by the Ottoman Turks within the last few

6:12

years, and we're looking for a way

6:14

to restore some national pride. And what

6:16

better way to restore national pride than raising

6:19

two thousand year old statues of your

6:21

you know, ancient gods that

6:24

were made by your predecessors. And

6:26

not only statues, but um, lamps

6:29

and bowls and utensils

6:31

and tools and just all sorts of stuff. It was a treasure

6:33

trove. Yeah. So, um, this this

6:35

site still is basically

6:38

intact. Um. It's a it's

6:40

the shipwreck is over Um

6:43

a couple of I think about

6:45

three d foot span, about the length of a football

6:47

field. And there's actually for

6:49

a long time they thought it was two ships, but

6:52

they think actually no, it was an enormous, massive

6:55

ship that broke into two and

6:57

is um they've only just found the

7:00

front. They found like the cabin, they haven't even

7:02

found the hold. And that it was a huge grain

7:04

ship that had been converted to basically a

7:06

treasure ship that was taking

7:08

Greek antiquities to Rome

7:11

around sixty b c. E um.

7:13

And it's sunk. So they there's

7:16

all these treasures that they haven't even found yet.

7:18

They dove on it in nineteen hundred

7:20

and one, Jacques Cousteau hit it

7:22

up in nineteen fifty and then again in nineteen and

7:26

now there's the most sophisticated

7:28

dives that are being taken on it.

7:31

Yes, he's on it UM.

7:33

As of two thousand and fourteen, there's an

7:35

international team that includes some people from

7:37

Woods Hole Geographic Institute or Oceanographic

7:40

Institute UM who are really

7:44

starting to figure this out. Yeah,

7:46

and you know, one of the reasons you're still doing this

7:48

is because, like you said, it's just a great find

7:50

no matter what. But the other reason is

7:52

because item number one zero eight

7:55

seven a k A. The

7:58

h how's that pronounced again? Annikathera

8:00

anacathera mechanism is UM

8:03

one of the most mysterious finds ever

8:06

because nobody knows who made it. Uh

8:08

and until recently no one

8:10

knew exactly what it was. But now they pretty

8:13

much figured it out. Yeah. Well, so when they

8:15

when they first brought it up in N one

8:18

UM again, it just looked

8:20

like some weird kind of kind of

8:22

like a clock, but it was in a wooden

8:24

frame as the wooden frame was exposed

8:26

to the air, it's it split

8:30

and the stuff inside fell apart.

8:32

And when it fell apart, one of the

8:35

directors of the museum, I believe spirit

8:38

On Stais another great name.

8:40

Um, he looked inside and realized that

8:42

these are all like actually different bronze

8:45

parts, and they have inscriptions and

8:47

they appear to be geared teeth

8:49

like precision gears. Right, Except

8:52

that's impossible because that

8:54

technology didn't come along for well

8:57

over a thousand years later, yes, a

8:59

thousand plus, like maybe fourteen

9:01

hundred, two thousand years later, right, So it

9:03

pops up in the west about the

9:06

fourteenth century in Europe.

9:08

So yeah, like you say, it's totally impossible

9:11

that this could be what what he's looking

9:13

at, not fifty or a hundred years. So

9:15

some people said, Um, this thing

9:18

probably accidentally was dropped

9:20

over this wreck site and just happened to

9:22

nestle in and make it seem like it

9:24

was part of this ancient shipwreck. Nope,

9:27

No, it was found underneath other debris

9:29

in the shipwreck. So that's virtually impossible.

9:32

But it was so confounding, and it's so completely

9:35

undermined our understanding

9:37

at the time of technology

9:40

like that and just the understanding

9:43

of that kind of precision engineering. Um

9:45

that it was just set aside, like no one knows

9:47

what this says. Let's just pretend it doesn't exist.

9:50

Yeah. Uh, and that happened until about

9:53

the nineteen fifties. And uh, we'll take a little

9:55

break here and we'll get back to what happened

9:57

in the nineteen fifties right after this. Alright,

10:14

so it's nineteen fifties. Everyone's

10:17

drunk at lunch, smoking cigarette,

10:19

throwing trash out of their window, right, and there's

10:21

an impossible machine rotting

10:24

away in a museum

10:26

in Greece, that's right. And that's when a man named

10:29

Derek Dislo Price. Uh

10:32

so, you know what, this thing is pretty neat and

10:34

I think I'm gonna make this my new obsession.

10:37

So he spent years researching this thing

10:40

and basically said, I think it's

10:42

some sort of weird Uh he

10:44

said computer. He meant, well,

10:47

he didn't mean computer, because

10:49

it can't be a computer. Obviously it's

10:51

not programmable

10:53

now, so it can't be a computer. But it's

10:57

I mean that words not terribly

10:59

far off off. Yeah,

11:01

it's not a computer. So he's using

11:03

the wrong word there. But along with Dr c

11:06

uh Man another great Greek name Kara

11:09

Kallos, he's a radiographer.

11:12

He said, let's take some X rays of this thing. In

11:14

the nineteen seventy four he published as Findings

11:16

in Gears from the Greeks, which

11:19

he thought was gonna light the world

11:21

on fire. But it turns out

11:23

people were a little scared, uh

11:26

to say, Yeah, this thing is predates

11:29

these kind of precision gears by well over

11:31

a thousand years, So let's rethink everything

11:33

we know about this kind of technology.

11:36

Everyone, No one wanted to touch it with the tin footpole,

11:38

is what I gathered. It was kind of ignored

11:41

the at the time. The people who

11:43

were studying ancient Greece were

11:45

studying their written documents, right, they

11:47

weren't studying like artifacts,

11:49

like physical relics or anything like that, and

11:52

they certainly weren't really up

11:54

on the ancient Greek technology technology.

11:58

Um. And so yeah, he wrote this this

12:00

book and just expected it to change

12:02

the world because he really had approached

12:04

it from a very scientific standpoint.

12:07

When they finally released his book in the seventies,

12:09

right, his theory on what it was was correct. Yeah,

12:11

he theorized that It was a I'm

12:14

going to use the word computer alright,

12:17

a mechanism. It

12:19

was a mechanism with UM at

12:21

one point up to seventy two different

12:23

precise gears, two gears

12:26

that all interacted with one another to

12:28

track the movement of the celestial

12:31

bodies, the five

12:33

planets that were visible to the naked

12:36

eye, the Sun, the

12:38

Moon, It tracked eclipses solar

12:40

and lunar um.

12:42

And it also um

12:45

it tracked the Olympic Games

12:47

just as an added bonus. Well, if you're

12:49

gonna have a astronomical

12:52

calculator, you might as well throw in a

12:54

sports calendar. Yeah, you know, might

12:57

as well. Uh, and so

12:59

the whole thing again, this thing should

13:01

not have existed, like it wasn't

13:04

for another four years

13:06

before anything like this appeared

13:09

in the West. Um. So

13:11

it shouldn't have been which was another reason why

13:13

a lot of people weren't like, yes,

13:15

this is a great book Gears from

13:17

the Greeks. It changed everything.

13:20

They were like, you're totally full of it. And

13:22

this poor guy, Um Price was

13:25

not helped at all by a guy named Eric

13:27

van Danikin right. Yeah,

13:30

he wrote a book in uh nineteen

13:33

sixty eight called Chariots of the Gods, and

13:36

in that he proposed that, um, there are

13:38

aliens who have been bringing us technological

13:41

gifts to Earth and this is one of

13:43

them. And everyone this was

13:45

a really popular book, so he

13:47

got all the headlines with just

13:49

a completely fabricated story. Yeah,

13:51

it was like it was the birth of the interest

13:53

in ufology and the Bermuda

13:56

Triangle. The Naski lines

13:58

are um landing strips,

14:01

that kind of stuff. Right, So when this

14:03

guy came along and put his stamp

14:05

of um

14:07

nuttiness, I guess if

14:10

certainly interesting. That whole Time Life Mysteries

14:13

series definitely came out of

14:15

this von Dannikin's work kind

14:17

of thing, but it had nothing

14:19

to do with any kind of academy or scholarliness,

14:22

right, so he really helped put

14:25

the kai bosh on Price's

14:27

work. This gears from the Greeks,

14:29

and it languished for a while, um

14:32

for another couple of decades,

14:35

I believe, right, Yeah, that's right. It

14:37

wasn't until the mid two thousand's

14:39

that they decided, you know what, we had this

14:42

great technology now called CT

14:44

scanning, computed UH tomography,

14:47

and what we can do with this stuff? We can

14:49

actually get inside this thing. And

14:52

there are videos of this actually being done on

14:54

the mechanism. It's really cool looking.

14:56

You can like watch it unfold in real time. And

14:59

they basedly figured out from the inside out

15:02

how this thing worked and how it operated.

15:05

And it is as follows. There's a

15:08

picture like a a wooden box

15:11

about the size of a shoe box. Right, Yeah,

15:14

it looks bigger to me, but I guess um I saw

15:16

someone else to describe it like a thick

15:18

laptop size. Okay, again

15:20

with the computers, people just can't stop. It's the computer,

15:23

an ancient computer. On

15:25

one side of the box, if if it's standing

15:28

like a shoe box on end. On one

15:30

side, there's a crank like just

15:32

a small dial with a little handle they

15:34

would used to crank this thing up. The handles missing.

15:36

Now, by the way, this is what you're

15:38

describing is what it looked like originally. Right.

15:41

Oh yeah, Now it's just disintegrated

15:44

blobs and chunks of things. Yeah.

15:46

So the knob on the side is what wound it forward

15:49

and backward. And uh,

15:51

then you had a big front side

15:53

and a backside. All

15:56

the gears are in the middle contained their end. Yes,

15:58

and again these are gears with teeth

16:01

between fifteen and

16:03

twenty three of them on a

16:05

gear, and all of them. The number

16:07

of teeth that they have has to do with their

16:09

relationship to the other gears they interact

16:12

with, that's right. So they have all these different

16:14

hands. If you wound it up, it would engage these gears.

16:17

Uh. Each of the hands moves

16:19

at a separate pace and represents what you said

16:21

earlier, the five planets and

16:23

Earth in the moon basically Sun

16:26

and Sun and moon basically anything we can see

16:28

from Earth at this point, right, And these are the gears

16:30

inside, and the gears are physically

16:32

representing how the say,

16:35

the Sun and the Moon interact. Well,

16:37

now these are the hands, right, but then they're driving

16:40

the hands, and the hands have a representation

16:42

in the form of a colored orb on the face

16:44

of the actual mechanism the machine

16:47

exactly. So on the back side, you've got two more

16:49

dial systems. UH. One

16:51

is a calendar of the lunar and solar eclipse,

16:54

and another one UM,

16:56

basically, like you said, was the

16:58

sports calendar. The Olympics

17:01

are coming up than four years after that, there'll be more Olympics,

17:05

so four years. So on the front,

17:07

it was at tracked the day right. That

17:09

was the big the big front face of it.

17:13

I believe it did. Um. And then

17:15

on the back when it's when it's tracking eclipses

17:17

um that that actually

17:20

so chuck. When you make a clock, the

17:23

whole purpose of a clock is so any

17:25

guy can come along and be like, oh, it's

17:27

this day right. So you want

17:29

your clock to be accurate. The problem is if

17:31

you're tracking just the solar calendar,

17:34

you're tracking just the movement of the moon,

17:36

your clock is going to or your calendar

17:39

is eventually going to fall out a sink

17:42

and all of a sudden, something like one

17:44

of the solstic says, your summer solstice

17:46

is gonna show up in December after eighteen

17:49

years, right. So to

17:51

do that, and this has been like one of the

17:53

big things that clockmakers and calendar makers

17:55

have had to deal with forever. You

17:58

have to figure out how to reconcile the movement

18:00

of the sun and the moon with your

18:02

calendar so that it stays up

18:05

to date literally right and

18:09

mechanically but also mathematically

18:11

right. So several

18:14

great thinkers figured out that if

18:16

you take um

18:19

the tracking of the moon and

18:22

extrapolated by enough times, it

18:24

will eventually sync up years

18:26

down the line with the solar

18:28

calendar. I think over the

18:30

course of like nineteen years, and this

18:32

is what's called the metonic cycle. Right, there's

18:35

like five hundred and thirty four phases

18:38

of the moon in one nineteen

18:40

year period, and if you

18:42

can track that, then you can keep your calendar

18:45

in sync. This is the level of

18:47

sophistication that the

18:50

the antick, THEA mechanism

18:53

operates on. And to this

18:55

point, we did not realize

18:57

that the ancient Greeks had this level of

18:59

understanding of astronomy. Yeah, it was. It

19:01

was a big It was a big fine for a lot

19:03

of reasons, and that's one of them for sure. Yeah. And

19:06

one of the reasons that we know that they knew this

19:08

and we're not just kind of putting our

19:10

own ideas onto it is when

19:12

they use that computer tomography,

19:14

they found inscriptions on

19:17

all these different gears which basically said

19:19

how they work and what they track, which

19:21

is another reason this find was so amazing.

19:24

It basically had an instruction manual engraved

19:26

on it. That's right, and we will talk more

19:28

about that right after this. All

19:45

right, So you're talking about the inscriptions, um,

19:47

Like you said, it was a user's guide. If

19:49

there's going to be a sophisticated piece of equipment,

19:52

like, uh, this computer, it's

19:55

gonna come with a book that says here's how you

19:57

use it. Uh. So the finding

20:00

I mean, they're doing a pretty good job of discovering the

20:02

stuff on their own, but then finding the user's guide

20:04

and piecing that together became even a

20:06

bigger part of the puzzle. It did. And then that user

20:09

guy. It also too if like you're an anthropologist

20:11

from five years in the future and you happened

20:13

upon a user guide to a mac

20:16

or something, right, it also

20:18

describes like the level of technology

20:20

that the people who built this computer had, Like

20:23

in writing, it says, this is what we know, this

20:26

is what we understand. So again,

20:28

this backdated the

20:30

understanding of astronomy among

20:33

the Greeks too, far earlier

20:35

than we'd ever given them credit for. And

20:37

it confirmed a lot of stuff that had been

20:39

thrown out over the years as flights

20:42

of fancy your imagination by writers

20:44

who had cited this kind of understanding

20:47

um of the people of their time, and

20:49

later historians were like, these people were just just

20:51

making up and it was a lucky guess. This

20:54

this mechanism has helped show No,

20:56

these these guys actually knew what they were talking

20:58

about. Yeah. One of those was UM.

21:01

There was a belief, uh, well

21:03

by some but not held by others,

21:05

that UM ancient Greeks had calendars

21:07

where they excluded certain days to

21:10

adjust the lengths of the months. A

21:12

lot of people like, no, no, no no, no, there's there's no

21:14

way that they were that sophisticated

21:17

this machine basically, and the accompanying

21:20

guide book proved it to be true,

21:22

which is pretty great. And because

21:25

of its sophistication, there a list of

21:28

people from that time that they think may

21:30

have had a hand in this UM. Of

21:32

course, Archimedes, he's gonna be in there

21:34

anytime something specialist found. Yeah,

21:36

and there's actually writing about Archimedes

21:39

creating a like a a sphere,

21:41

a three dimensional model that actually doesn't

21:44

really sound like the antithera

21:46

mechanism now, but it will be on any list

21:48

if you find something that, like any mechanism,

21:50

is sophisticated. Hipparchus,

21:54

who I think, I don't know if we talked about him

21:56

yet or not. He's a mathematician and

21:58

astronomer, and uh,

22:01

I think he the time period worked out for him,

22:03

so he could have been one of the people involved. My

22:06

money's on him, you know, yeah, or

22:08

his student Poseidonest Okay,

22:10

was that Posidonius?

22:12

Yeah, I like Poseidoness. I'm

22:16

sure he did too, because that makes him sound like a

22:19

Greek god. Yeah. Uh.

22:21

There are also some other hints,

22:23

you know, trying to piece together the mystery. UM.

22:26

One of the inscriptions refers to

22:29

an athletic event in Rhodes, which

22:31

is where Hipparcus taught,

22:34

where his school was. Yeah, and there's

22:36

a man named Alexander Jones. He's a specialist

22:38

at n y U and that's what he said.

22:41

My money's on roads. Is that that's where this thing

22:43

came from, Yeah, Hipparcus, Yeah,

22:45

maybe Poseidoness. The

22:48

other thing that helps is UM, well, it doesn't

22:51

help necessarily UM Hipparcus's

22:53

case, but it kind of excludes

22:56

Archimedes. Some researchers

22:58

um looked at all Babylonian

23:00

records of eclipses and tried to

23:03

sink this thing up, and apparently

23:06

they were able to exclude hundreds of

23:08

different possibilities and settled

23:10

on two oh five b c E

23:13

being the start date for the mechanism.

23:16

Yeah, I think it's a little older than they originally

23:18

thought, right, Yeah, they were thinking fifty two hundred

23:21

BC, and they're like, no, two

23:23

oh five is probably the date that

23:25

this thing was intended to be set to. Because

23:28

again, this thing's tracking the movements

23:30

of the bodies in the heavens based

23:33

on the movement of the sun in the moon,

23:35

and how do you track that by tracking eclipses?

23:38

So you would want to set it to an eclipse because

23:40

there has to be some starting point to set it to,

23:42

right, So they figured it was two oh five.

23:44

Well, Archimedes, as you remember, we did

23:47

a whole episode on him. We did

23:49

someone the Death Ray. Yes, um,

23:51

he was killed by a Roman soldier in two

23:54

twelve, um because he wouldn't

23:56

pay attention to the soldier who was telling him to

23:59

um, pay tension, I think. But

24:01

he was killed in two twelve, so that

24:03

probably excludes him. He was so

24:06

smart he knew that of an eclipse

24:08

was coming in seven years and wanted his

24:10

mechanism to start. Then he was so broke he

24:12

couldn't pay attention. Here

24:15

we hear that one. No, this is my first time

24:18

but hearing that joke. Yeah, yeah, those

24:20

are good, you know. In the burn

24:23

contest or whatever your mama

24:25

jokes. Yeah, yeah, kids,

24:28

it's a good one though. Uh what else?

24:31

What else you got here? Did not think that was going to make

24:33

an appearance in the UM.

24:36

Well since then, there have been uh ten

24:39

models, at least ten um that

24:41

have been built kind of recreating this thing.

24:43

Um. There was a watchmaker that um got

24:45

into it, and of course that was a pretty uh

24:48

the way the things put together, it seems like a watching

24:51

clockmaker would be an ideal, stand it.

24:54

Yeah, made one. Well, they made

24:56

three of this watch and

24:58

it's it's like a watch verse and of it. That's

25:00

pretty amazing. It's pretty cool. I wonder how much

25:02

they went for those three. Oh, I'm sure

25:04

they were pretty cheap. Somebody made

25:06

one out of Legos. Yeah.

25:10

Was it a Lego set or was it just someone made a

25:12

Lego model? Oh, they made a Lego

25:14

model. It was like an Apple engineer. I didn't

25:16

know. I thought it might have been a Lego set, like a very

25:19

obscure Lego set. Uh not yet.

25:21

I'll be the engineers, like, I'll

25:23

sell you these plans Lego if

25:25

you want them. Old Kirk check. There's

25:27

one thing that um, it's amazing

25:30

when we're like, wow, you know this, this knowledge

25:32

is even older than we we thought. And

25:36

a lot of people um point out that

25:38

in the West, Yes, it took until

25:41

the fourteen the fourteenth

25:43

century for this knowledge to come about. We

25:45

likely got it from um Muslims

25:48

Muslim scholars, but it's possible

25:50

that it came to the West via Muslim

25:53

scholars from the Greeks. So

25:55

this knowledge was around the

25:58

Muslims that were interacting with the Weeks gained

26:00

this knowledge and they had themselves

26:04

until they finally interacted with us in the

26:06

West in the fourteenth century.

26:08

Right, it's pretty amazing. But

26:11

other people are like, yeah, that's great. Why

26:14

didn't the Greeks build on this.

26:16

If they had this sophisticated and understanding

26:19

of how to track time and

26:21

the movement of the heavenly

26:24

bodies, why did

26:26

they stop there? Well, they may not have. They

26:29

did, that's the thing. Well, no, I

26:31

mean until we find the next

26:33

thing that was years

26:36

after that that we previously didn't know about. Now the

26:38

point is like, why didn't they build stuff

26:40

that survived and came down to this

26:42

day and they didn't, Like there's

26:44

there's incontrovertibly they did not build

26:47

on it or else we would have it today.

26:49

And Arthur C. Clark is saying, if they

26:52

had built on this level of sophistication

26:55

and it had continued uninterrupted

26:57

today, we'd be traveling amongst the stars

27:00

by now, after two thousand years of having

27:02

this knowledge. I don't see how anyone

27:04

can say that, though, How can you say that they'll never find

27:07

another mechanism after

27:09

this that built on that? You

27:11

won't. What I'm saying is that

27:14

knowledge wasn't built on, and built on, and built on and

27:16

built on uninterrupted. Oh so they

27:18

may have built on. They could have, but for

27:21

what from what we understand that they didn't. My

27:23

money's on finding something else that makes a little

27:25

more sense out of this. Well, they did find something else. In

27:28

three a man in Beirut was in a bizarre

27:31

and found some weird geared mechanism,

27:34

and they figured out that it was a sixth century

27:36

ce Um calendar,

27:39

like a geared calendar. It's the second oldest

27:41

geared mechanism known to humankind

27:44

for now, after the anti

27:46

Cathera mechanism. We may find an entire

27:50

civilization underwater. No,

27:54

but you never know, alright, you

27:56

never know, You never know. I'm

27:59

sure. Before they on this, they

28:01

were saying that they were never advanced enough to make

28:03

something like this. Yeah, the point is that that

28:06

they weren't advanced enough. The point is is they

28:09

didn't build on this advancement until

28:11

we find out that they have right. Well, whatever

28:14

whatever came in and broke that building

28:16

on it and interrupted it, that was That

28:19

sucks because we could be far more advanced

28:21

than we are. It could have been a volcano

28:24

that covered a laboratory and ash

28:27

that sunk underwater, and that's where

28:29

the underwater civilization has been. Yeah, you

28:31

never know in the lab Uh.

28:34

If you want to know more about the anti Kate Thera mechanism,

28:36

you just try your hand at spelling that. It's

28:39

fun to say, isn't it. Yeah, And it's easy to

28:41

spell if he sounds um and do

28:43

that in the search bar at how stuff works.

28:45

And since they said search parts, time for listener, ma'am,

28:49

I'm gonna call this mea culpa. Hey,

28:52

guys, absolutely love stuff you should know and have listened

28:54

to every episode many more than once. You

28:57

keep me company on many a long commute.

28:59

While I was listening to the Void That Manuscript

29:01

podcast, which was awesome, I noticed

29:04

Chuck said a possible explanation was mental illness.

29:06

Josh said, yes, like an autistic

29:09

monk. I'm sure you know this, but autism

29:11

is a developmental disorder, not a mental illness. Behavioral

29:14

therapist who worked with autistic children. That

29:16

makes me very sensitive these matters. Thanks

29:19

for your great work. My favorite ever was Berlin Wall

29:21

and then it's from Tricia Flowers, and I

29:24

think her subject line was I still love you guys.

29:27

Uh So, we've gotten quite a lot of feedback

29:29

on this, and I'll

29:32

let you take it away. It was a mistake. Yeah, it's

29:34

totally misspoke. Yeah, I don't think that

29:37

autism is a form of mental illness. What

29:39

I should have said and meant to say was or

29:42

an autistic monk or a

29:44

monk with autism, I think is the proper

29:47

way to put it. Yeah, so not like

29:50

yeah, sometimes in the heat of the moment, sure

29:52

like or as but

29:55

yes, no, I don't think that those two are the same.

29:58

Yeah, So all apologies people. We we certainly

30:00

don't think that, and I always want to correct

30:03

ourselves, so, especially when something

30:05

we'd say accidentally causes distress

30:08

among people. There's no and to let that stand.

30:10

Agreed, yeah uh yeah,

30:13

So thank you Tricia. We

30:15

appreciate you um writing

30:17

in to let us. We'll set us straight, call

30:20

us out, whatever you wanna call it in a very

30:22

nice way. Yes uh. And if

30:24

you want to set us straight or say

30:27

whatever, you can get in touch with us via

30:29

s y s K podcast on Twitter. You

30:32

can send us an email, the Stuff Podcast,

30:34

the House, Stuff Works dot com. You can hang out

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30:38

we should Know and has always hang out with us

30:40

at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot

30:43

com For

30:48

more on this and thousands of other topics. Is

30:51

it how Stuff Works dot com