Do we know anything at all about the creators of this device, other than that they were Greek? Where was it made? What kind of tools did they use to do the machining? How large was the workshop or factory where it was manufactured? Who was the target customer, how much did it cost?
Since we have only one device like this and it was found under rare circumstances (shipwreck), it seems like you could do a Bayesian analysis to get a rough order of magnitude estimate of how many of these were built.
> What kind of tools did they use to do the machining?
There is a nice serie of videos by Clickpring partially building a copy. He used tools that he guess were available at that time. It's more a good guess by a current expert than a 100% accurate historically based list of tools, but it looks like a good guess.
Only circumstantially: we can guess that it was made by Greeks and we know a fair bit about their economy and bronze working ability from other historical sources. But if this had never been discovered, a reasonable guess for how many mechanisms of this sophistication existed would be zero.
Thanks, that's an excellent article. I'm still not really convinced that Archimedes made it, as it would be a massive coincidence for the only device we found to be the same one described in a book by some notable figure. It seems plausible that Archimedes may have created the original design, though.
I assume that the average person who encountered one would have been very impressed, so I find it really surprising that we don't have more texts that at least mention the existence of these devices.
Your assumption about average people might be giving undue credit. Average people werent literate. They might not have any use for a calendar or know about astronomy if they even believed in the constellations as something other than godly.
Very few people were in the circles of the highly educated. With many other intricate, rare instruments throughout history, the case is that they were commissioned by the extraordinarily wealthy from the most notable scholars and inventors
Sorry, I meant the average educated person who might write a book. It just seems strange that we have only one reference to the device in all surviving classical literature
Cicero wrote of similar devices and attributed them to Archimedes.
However, maybe that attribution is similar to attributing the light bulb to Edison. We don't know who Archimedes might have been working with, who's shoulders he might have been standing on, etc.
> Do we know anything at all about the creators of this device? Where was it made? What kind of tools did they use to do the machining? How large was the workshop or factory where it was manufactured? Who was the target customer, how much did it cost?
Since we have only one device like this and it was found under rare circumstances (shipwreck), it seems like you could do a Bayesian analysis to get a rough order of magnitude estimate of how many of these were built.