When we talk about airplanes, cars and even construction tools we have to realize these things are a lot older than are believed. What held up many of these devices from becoming more modern was the fact there was no power source other than human or animal. Its true water and wind could be used in some limited cases, but they didn’t work for cranes and lifting devices or for cars and airplanes. When Leonardo da Vinci drew a picture of what he called an aerial screw, it was really the first idea for a helicopter. The blades of a helicopter are tilted and they sort of screw the plane up into the air, so Leonardo was not very far off in what he believed. Perhaps if he would’ve worked on this invention he would’ve discovered propellers were more efficient, but he still would have had a problem and that was how to power the machine sufficiently to get it off the ground.

When we think about powering different machines we can’t help but imagine how different and more advanced our society would have been if we would’ve had a power source two thousand years ago. Actually we did, but it was never taken advantage of in any meaningful way. The power source was steam and as we all know it was invented by Hero of Alexandria. What many people don’t realize is a power source would have been very important for ancient computers. It is hard for us to imagine how long ago ancient computers were used. We know an ancient computer called the Antikythera Mechanism was found in a Greek shipwreck and it was over two thousand years old. It was a clockwork device and so advanced scientists could not believe their eyes when they found some of its parts used gears which we had thought were not invented for another fourteen hundred years.

The ancients had been working on building computers thousands of years ago. While scientists were fast to proclaim the Antikythera mechanism was the first computer, they should not have said this. Before it was found it was believed the first computers were not invented for more than a thousand years after that discovery. How do we know there wasn’t one which preceded it? The strange thing about the Antikythera Mechanism was the fact it was far more advanced than anything which came after it in the next seventeen hundred years or so. We think this anyway, because we haven’t found anything to rival it in that time period. One of the problems is things disappear from history and may never be found, thus we may never know they existed, but this doesn’t mean they didn’t exist, but it also doesn’t mean they did. I once read an interesting article in which a scientist proposed one day we would be able to recover the light which has escaped from earth and is traveling through space. He said we may have the technology someday to recover what this light recorded and if that ever happens we might just know everything about our past.

Before the Antikythera Mechanism was discovered, scientists believed the first primitive computer was the abacus. Both the Romans and the Chinese had a version of it. The abacus was more like a hand operated adding machine than anything else. The abacus is quite old and its origins are said to date back to Mesopotamia and is believed it first appeared somewhere around 2700 BC. It is said its primary use was for addition and subtraction, because it proved difficult to use it for more complex calculations. Contrary to current belief the Chinese did not adopt the abacus until about the 2nd century BC.

A lot of mechanical computers came along, but almost all of them were made to do addition and subtraction and were more like a mechanical abacus. It is interesting to note in the sixteen hundreds a computer was a man who did calculations or computations, not a device. In the beginning of the eighteen hundreds the first programmable device appeared. It was not a computer, but a loom. It was programmed by punch cards and this method carried over to early mainframe computers. The programmable loom was demonstrated in 1804 by Frances Joseph-Marie Jacquard. In 1820 a new type of calculator appeared which could not only add and subtract, it could multiply and divide. The big change began in 1822 when a man named Charles Babbage began developing what he called the difference engine. In 1837 Charles Babbage developed the analytical engine which was able to use punch cards as its memory and also a way to program a computer which was completely mechanical.

It seems humans were determined to develop a machine which could not only solve problems but also remember things. Unfortunately using mechanical devices is not the way to go, because of their limitations. It might have been interesting to see somebody try to develop a steam powered computer in the age of steam or before, but to my knowledge this never happened. If we would’ve had electronic computers in Victorian times I’m sure a steam powered generator could have done the job. We know people were considering using steam power for airplanes and plans were even made for a commercial airliner, before any powered flights were ever made and this commercial airliner was to use a steam engine.

There have been reports of finding ancient calculating devices and one that comes to mind was a giant abacus like device which was found on an island. I don’t remember exactly where the island was or what its name was, but I do remember archaeologists stating it was so big animals were needed to move the buttons. Why anyone would want to build an abacus this big is beyond me, perhaps it had something to do with religion. All this proves one thing, humans were very inquisitive even thousands of years ago and they wanted some sort of a device which would help them not only in their monetary dealings, but eventually one which be able to solve complex problems and also remember facts. Today we take all this as a given, but in ancient times it was sheer fantasy.