So ...
I'm just hanging out on Discord,
minding my own business,
and then Brickfilm day is all
"hey, we're doing a Brickfilm event!"
I message James and tell him I'm all in,
then he's all "great!"
"Make a historical brickfilm!"
I just decided to look up
the most obscure invention
in human history,
and after several minutes of DESPERATELY
hitting the back button on some
UNINTEDED, SUPER-SKETCHY,
CLICKBAITY websites,
I had my list!
It was down to the moustrap pistol,
the straw hat radio,
and some computer they found at the ...
bottom of the ocean?
Okay, yeah ...
So apparently the Ancient
Greeks built this computer,
and then someone dropped it
at the bottom of the ocean.
This is called the "Antikythera Mechanism,"
and before you say anything,
no, it was not made by aliens.
The artifact's research site literally has
an FAQ, where they say, quote:
"Was it left by aliens?"
"No"
"By the same argument that it
is not evidence of time travel."
Someone got paid to sit
down and write that.
So, how did we find it?
A diving team in the
early 20th Century A.D.
found it in a shipwreck,
amongst pottery and jewelry
and coins and your standard
shipwreck treasure.
Makes sense they'd forget about
those weird green chunks of metal,
what with all that loot,
because no one actually sat down
to figure out what it was until the 70's.
A team of scientists made some
X-Ray and Gamma-Ray images of the device,
figuring out what the inner parts were,
and finding Greek script
they could actually read.
I think we need to turn
it on and off again.
Sadly, that was not an option.
Partially because it has no power switch,
and partially because it's in pieces.
There are seven large pieces
of the Antikythera Mechanism,
and seventy-five smaller pieces
that don't give many clues
as to what it is, or what it does.
So they took a look over the bigger chunks
and started figuring out
how they go together.
Instead of trying to slap
superglue all over these
ancient, 2000-year old pieces.
They made their own replica,
did some math, read some Greek,
and finally figured out what it does!
Well, partially what it does.
See, here's what we figured out:
If you turn the main
gear to a certain time,
the rest of the gears line up to predict
various astronimical events.
It predicts where the sun and moon will be,
what the moon's phase will be,
when the next eclipse is ...
It even tells you when
the next Olympics is!
Okay, there's some margin for error
considering the modern Olympics,
but let's give them some credit for
working with what they had here!
This device was created by
an ancient civilization,
that crafted these tiny gears,
with no modern tools,
and used paper and pen
to calculate the orbits
of the sun and the moon,
then use that math to build
a mechanical system to predict
pretty much exactly
when the next astronomical
event would occur.
And that's not all!
We are STILL trying to figure out
what the rest of this thing does,
as there are still MORE Greek inscriptions
and functions that we STILL DON'T FULLY
KNOW ABOUT!
What even is this thing?
Who build this thing,
and how, and why?
Nobody knows exactly where
and when it came from,
but historians guess it came from Rhodes
in Ancient Greece around 100 B.C.
But of course ... (laughs)
I've got it all figured out.
After binge-watching the
National Treasure movies
and arguing with people on Twitter
about why Temple of Doom is
NOT the best Indiana Jones movie,
it came to me.
The world's first computer?
CLEARLY, it was built by a college student!
More specifically,
this was built by a graduate student
fueled on nothing but
coffee and broken dreams.
Imagine, if you will,
a sad, miserable,
ancient Greek grad student,
spending countless late nights
working on this darn thing.
He's scribbling equations and making gears
and building and rebuilding prototypes,
and scrapping hours of faulty work.
His friends are all,
"Hey, bro, let's go get some bakalava!"
But he's all, "nah fam."
"I gotta finish my final project!'
Finally, the night of the deadline,
during the last all-nighter,
with more caffeine than blood
rushing through his veins,
he finishes his project.
At last ... he's DONE!
He takes his creation down to the docks
and sends his final project
to his teacher for grading.
They put it on a ship and he is RELIEVED!
He can finally GRADUATE!
Until weeks later,
when his teacher says he
never received the project,
and gives him a failing grade for the class
and now he can't graduate
because his final project is
now at the bottom of the ocean
and will not be discovered
again for another 2000 years.
But yes, that's my ultimate
history "fan theory."
And no,
it is not based on my WORST NIGHTMARES
as an engineering Ph.D. student.
It was made solely for
Brickfilm Day's History Event,
and not as a coping mechanism
to manage my fears
of my hard work and
research at my university
may result in my ultimate demise
as the unseen forces of darkness
descend upon my fragile state
FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF MY DECIMATION
But whatever.
Hope you learned something today
about Ancient Greek computers
and history and stuff.
Go watch the next Brickfilm Day video.
And turn in your homework.
Hey guys, this is Jared,
Some of you know me
as DudeBrick on here,
but as of this video's release,
Chris is lying on the floor ...
Not dead, not dead.
He's probably asleep or something.
But anyways, thanks for watching,
Check out the rest of the
Brickfilm Day History Event videos,
and uh, hopefully he wakes up soon.
'Cuz, you know.
He's not dead.
