מנגנונים
עשרים מנגנונים, בסדר שבו הסדרה קוראת אותם. כל אחד מוסיף דבר שקודמו לא יכול היה לעשות.
תוכן האובייקטים עצמם כתוב באנגלית ועדיין לא תורגם.
הסדר הקנוני
זמן ומדידה
The Antikythera Mechanism as a Temporal Astronomical State Engine
To turn a manually supplied amount of elapsed time into the coordinated astronomical and calendrical state that time implies - lunar phase and age, the Metonic and Callippic calendars, the Saros and Exeligmos eclipse cycles, the games cycle, and, on the lost front, the Sun, Moon and five known planets.
Hellenistic Greece, second to first century BCE; recovered from the Antikythera wreck
זמן ומדידה
The Planispheric Astrolabe as an Observer-Frame Projection Engine
To answer questions about altitude, azimuth, sidereal and solar time, rising, setting, meridian transit, seasonal hours and direction by superposing two coordinate systems of the celestial sphere on one plane.
Hellenistic origin, developed in the Islamic world from the eighth century and in Latin Europe thereafter
זמן ומדידה
The Torquetum as an Inter-Frame Transformation Engine
To measure or represent a celestial direction in one reference frame and read it in another, composing the local horizon, the celestial equator and the ecliptic in a single articulated instrument.
Medieval Europe and the Islamic world, thirteenth century onward
זמן ומדידה
The Equatorium as a Planetary Position Engine
To evaluate a geometrical planetary theory for a chosen date without repeating the trigonometric and tabular work the model would otherwise demand.
Islamic and Latin astronomy, eleventh to sixteenth century
זמן ומדידה
Giovanni de’ Dondi’s Astrarium as a Continuous Cosmic Clock
To drive the manually set geometry of the equatorium continuously, so that a clock, a calendar, a planetarium and a mechanical evaluator of medieval astronomy were one instrument.
Padua, completed 1364; known from de’ Dondi’s own treatise rather than from a surviving machine
מערכות וארכיטקטורה
Hero of Alexandria’s Automatic Theatre as a Mechanical Sequence Engine
To produce a predetermined dramatic sequence - doors, figures, sound, flame, stage movement - from a single descending weight.
Alexandria, first century CE, in the conventional chronology of Hero’s work; surviving manuscripts are later copies
זמן ומדידה
The Vitruvian Odometer as a Mechanical Distance Integrator
To measure distance travelled by counting wheel rotations and recording the count physically.
Described by Vitruvius, first century BCE; transmitted tooth counts are ambiguous and reconstructions compete
זמן ומדידה
The Byzantine Sundial-Calendar as a Portable Geared Lunisolar State Computer
To carry a predicted calendrical state and an observed local time in one portable instrument, for any of sixteen named places.
Byzantium, conventionally dated 400-600 CE; the most important surviving geared device between Antikythera and the medieval traditions
מערכות וארכיטקטורה
The South-Pointing Chariot as a Mechanical Direction-Preservation Engine
To keep a pointer aimed at a fixed world direction while the vehicle carrying it turns.
China, associated with Ma Jun in the third century CE, with fuller Song-period descriptions of later constructions
מערכות וארכיטקטורה
The Banu Musa Devices as a Hybrid Fluidic Control Engine
To make vessels, fountains, lamps and displays act on their own - regulating, switching and holding state without a person in the loop.
Baghdad, ninth century; roughly one hundred devices described by the three brothers
זמן ומדידה
Su Song’s Astronomical Clock Tower as a Distributed Temporal State Engine
To generate one regulated stream of timing events and distribute it to an armillary sphere, a celestial globe and time-announcing figures at once.
Kaifeng, constructed in the late eleventh century and documented in a treatise of the 1090s
מערכות וארכיטקטורה
Al-Jazari’s Machines as a Hydraulic Automation Engine
To build clocks, automata, fountains, vessels, locks and water-raising machines whose behaviour could be changed without rebuilding the machine.
Upper Mesopotamia, 1206, in the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
ידע וזיכרון
The Scientific Volvelle as a Layered Circular Lookup and Transformation Engine
To perform calendrical, astronomical, navigational and logical operations on a page, by turning paper discs.
Medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed books
ידע וזיכרון
The Sector as a Proportional Geometry Engine
To carry out arithmetic, geometric, stereometric and military calculations by converting numerical ratios into distances on rays from a common hinge.
Several late-sixteenth-century contexts; documented by Galileo’s manual of 1606
ידע וזיכרון
The Slide Rule as a Logarithmic Arithmetic Engine
To multiply and divide by sliding, so that a hard operation becomes an easy one.
Seventeenth century onward, following Napier’s logarithms and Gunter’s scale; the central engineering computer until electronic calculators
ידע וזיכרון
The Pascaline and the Step Reckoner as Decimal Digital Arithmetic Engines
To mechanise decimal digit state and carry, for administrative arithmetic and then for repeated addition with positional shifting.
Pascal from the 1640s; Leibniz’s stepped-drum principle later in the same century
מערכות וארכיטקטורה
The Jacquard Mechanism as an External-Program Pattern Control Engine
To automate the selection of warp threads, so that a long control sequence lives in a replaceable medium rather than in the loom.
France, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, with earlier contributions by Bouchon, Falcon and Vaucanson
מערכות וארכיטקטורה
Babbage’s Analytical Engine as a General-Purpose Mechanical Computer Architecture
To compute anything a sequence of operations could express, rather than the single class of results a difference engine produces.
From the 1830s; documented by Menabrea in 1842 and Lovelace in 1843, and never completed in Babbage’s lifetime
זמן ומדידה
Kelvin’s Tide-Predicting Machine as a Mechanical Harmonic Prediction Engine
To turn coefficients obtained from tidal analysis into a continuous curve of future tides.
Britain, from the 1870s; William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin
מערכות וארכיטקטורה
The Differential Analyzer as a Continuous Differential-Equation Engine
To solve differential equations by physically interconnecting components that stand for mathematical operations.
MIT, around 1931; Vannevar Bush and colleagues, with later analyzers varying in scale and automation