These days technology rules the roost and robots take questions in the House of Lords. In the West at least, the Greeks (as ever) got there first. Like the Romans, they were fascinated by hydraulics, springs, pistons, gears, sprockets, pulley-chains – and experimented with them to produce a whole range of lifting, digging, and propelling devices, especially for military purposes.
A breakthrough happened when some Ancient Greeks, observing that the earth and heavens revolved in predictable circles, mimicked them in hand-cranked, bronze mechanisms consisting of complex, linked cogwheels to replicate and predict that movement – the first analogue computers.
The single recovered example is the Antikythera machine (2nd century bc), named after the island off which it was found. It has at least 35 wheels, the largest of which has 223 teeth. On similar lines we read about Archimedes’ planetarium (3rd century bc) simulating movements of the sun, moon and planets, and Ptolemy’s astrolabe (first century ad), a sort of GPS system – and much else.
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