Was this the birth of CNC ?

Stub Here is a very nice example of Heron’s Aeolipile. What I want to find out about is the levitating chariot. Or was it a trick?

Heron was employed to make worshipers in the various temples go Oh-Ah! and incidentally put coins in the collection boxes.

The Greeks knew about static electricity and the Babylonians built batteries. Even the word Electron is the Greek name for Amber.

If you want to talk about computers how about the Antikythera here

Dick

Edited By Terryd on 12/12/2011 20:59:27

Billy I will agree with you about the wheels on the Home Pointing Chariot. The Chinese were very good craftsmen. They knew about both the Compass plane and the lathe so there was no problem over wheel sizes. The main cause of errors with the chariot was bumps in the road, but these generally averaged themselves out. The chariots would be deployed in ‘foreign’ or ‘enemy’ territory.

They used lodestones yes but they did not understand the problems of Magnetic Variation. which is something the Hungarians do not know either.

Have a look at the Beijing Ancient Observatory. Although this place is quite late on, the mid 1400s, it was very accurate. It had one of the world’s first seismographs for providing the authorities with information about earthquakes (for disaster relief). Its main use was for providing accurate information for astrological.

Edited By Billy Mills on 16/12/2011 13:28:46

Billy you are right the Antikythera was a mechanism to replicate planetary motion and to provide corrections to sundials used to set the public water clocks. It is not the only example of such an apparatus in existence. There is Richard of Wallingford’s celestial clock, which he never finished, but has been made as a modern replica. There is also the great clock in Prague and hordes of others. None of these are computers in the true modern sense of the word but are mechanical simulations of the situation as we understand it. It of course is incomplete in the same way that when you think that float glass is flat. It is not as I learned when I used a piece as an optical flat in an 8” Newtonian telescope. Float glass is actually a spherical whose radius is that of the earth where it was made.

I had fun once with the corrections to a form of gyroscope. This thing was mounted on a large steel tube which went down into the bed rock. It used to display movement and seemed to be slowly moving in one direction. They had taken the earth’s movements around the sun but had forgotten earth’s precession or the earth orbit round the sun and the wobble of the earth’s axis. My programmer had the vapours over that one. The corrections were added to the program but it still showed drift. Not acceptable to the customer. I had to do a lot of digging into astronomy and found that the sun its self was moving through space. New corrections were added and the thing settled down to be within the experimental error. The customer bought the system but not the program. We can write that ourselves they said. Result -2 years later the sued us for the program specification and lost the day. The bought at a huge cost both the program, its specification and support from the Executive in Electronic Information Organisation. Yes assistant analyst was the EIEIO!