History of Science and Technology

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A functioning antikythera mechanism made out of Legos….need I say more?

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A short but useful overview of TBMs

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This is a good article on TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines). The quality is fortunate since I have been unable to find a general history of the subject either on the internet or in book form. These machines are fascinating. Their behavior is almost like that of a living organism; they destroy vast volumes of underspace only to create, in their wake, a cavern, suitable for habitation, in a world uniquely hostile to human forms of existence.

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The above watch is designed around the system of “temporal hours” used in traditional Japanese clocks (known as Wadokei). Like a western 24 hour clock, the wadokei is what I call mono-diurnal; the hour hand goes round the clock face once per day. Compare this to the bi-diurnal 12 hour clock which goes round twice per day. Unlike the European style mono-diurnal, the wadokei divides the day into 12 segments called “koku”—each of which is assigned the name of a sign of the Chinese zodiac (the hour of the horse for example). Also unlike the Western method, the wadokei is based around local solar time as opposed to mean/civil time; the time of sunrise determines the begining of the day and the start of the first hour at a given location. Very unlike the Western system, the Japanese hours are of uneven length; this means that as the days lengthen and shorten with the changing of seasons, the clock must alter the length of the hours in response. 

Many traditional wadokei require some form of manual adjustment to be preformed. The up and coming watch maker Masahiro Kikuno, however, has devised a system, inspired by some of the finest horological mechanical engineering of 19th century Japan, which does not require this intervention. For those watch enthusiasts, this means implementing an equation of time movement among other things.

While the system has not been used in an official capacity since the Meiji reforms in 1873, wadokei are fascinating time pieces which stand in contrast to Western methods.

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This article details a young Japanese watch maker who is designing a traditional Japanese time keeping movement into a wrist watch. Read this article to get a sense of how challenging the task is. Also contained are some nice historical tid-bits.

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The traditional system of Japanese time keeping is based on local solar time as opposed to mean/civil time. Like a 24 hour clock, the wadokei (literally “Japanese Clock”), is mono-diurnal. I coin this term to describe a clock face whose hour hand rotates once per day. The 12 hour system, in contrast, is bi-diurnal. The Italians experimented with a 6 hour clock face during the 18th century and this would be tetra-diurnal. Unlike the Western 24 hour clock, the wadokei is divided into 12 sections—each named after a sign of the Chinese zodiac. Very unlike the Western system, these hours are of uneven length. The Japanese clocks are very elegant in design and are fascinating to contrast with the European style.

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This is a highly unusual video for at least two reasons; the first of which is that it is one of the most outstanding videos on positional astronomy that I have come across on the internet.  The second is that the educator is an astrologer. Let me be clear that I agree with the modern scientific consensus; astrology is unable to live up to most of its claims (the studies of Gauqelin being a possible exception). Nevertheless, for its cultural and historical merits I believe it behooves educated individuals to learn something of it’s details and background. Entirely aside from this agenda, this lecture, totaling almost two hours of material, is of value to even the most staunchly skeptical of astronomy students.

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Eudoxus of Cnidus was an early astronomer and mathematician. Arguably his most significant legacy was to combine Greek geometry with Babylonian astronomy; the celestial sphere seems to have been his creation as was the ambition of modeling, through reduction,  the complex motions of the heavens to a smaller number of distinct composite movements; so far as can be told this project was unprecedented.

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For those who are interested this is the innovation for which the watch maker George Daniels became famous. His escapement, known as the Co-Axial or Daniels escapement, was invented in the early 1970s and was arguably the most fundamental breakthrough in the design of the escapement since the creation of the lever escapement in the 18th century.

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A great video on how watches work and a fine example of educational media. It does not over simplify and yet avoids bogging the viewer down in details.

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This documentary is set to be released sometime in 2014. It’s subject matter is one of the greatest watchmakers of all time (George Daniels) and the man (Roger Smith) who set out to become his apprentice. It should be a stimulating look into the world of independent watch making.

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An outstanding documentary on the history of mechanical automata.