The Englishman built a model of the sphere of Archimedes

Mention of mechanical models of the sky is found in the works of several ancient authors. Usually such models are associated with Archimedes. The earliest mention of such a model is found in the dialogue of the Roman author Marcus Tullius Cicero , created in the first century BC. One of the characters in the dialogue describes how Roman General Mark Claudius Marcellus attacked the house of Archimedes in Syracuse in 212 BC. In the course of this attack, Archimedes himself was killed, and the general took for himself one single thing — the scope of Archimedes.

When the character saw the sphere in action, he realized that Archimedes was the greatest genius. The Archimedes model included the Sun, the Moon, and five planets known at that time. Each of the objects moved along a certain trajectory with a certain speed.

Historians have long believed that the description of the sphere that Cicero gave was a mere fiction. But the discovery of the Anti-Kite mechanism gave scientists a reason to believe that the Romans and the Greeks could create extremely complex mechanical systems.
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The remains of the mechanism were examined, including with the help of X-ray tomography. The original reconstruction of the mechanism was created by the English historian of science Derek John de Solla Price. The scientist conducted an x-ray study of the mechanism and built its scheme. In 1959, he published a detailed description of the device in Scientific American. The complete scheme of the device was introduced only in 1971 and contained 32 gears.


Wright shows the details of his mechanism, there are 24 gears in total.

Michael Wright, an expert on mechanical devices from the London Museum of Science, undertook a new study of the mechanism, for which he used X-ray tomography techniques. Two-dimensional radiographic sections of the mechanism were constructed and studied. The preliminary results of the study were presented in 1997. They showed that there are fundamental errors in the reconstruction of the Price. In particular, it was convincingly shown that the assumption of the presence of a differential gear in the mechanism is not true. In 2002, Wright offered his renovation. He confirmed the general conclusion of Price that the mechanism served to simulate the motion of celestial bodies. According to Wright, the mechanism could model the motion of not only the Sun and the Moon, but also of the five ancient planets known as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Now Michael Wright has built the model and the scope of Archimedes , however, in his work he used a large number of assumptions and guesses. The mechanical model of the sphere proposed by Wright will be presented to the general public on September 27, 2015 at an exhibition in Basel, Switzerland. Interestingly, Wright did exactly the scope, although most modern scientists believe that the model was flat.



The mechanical model of the sphere of Archimedes, created by Wright, contains 24 gears, as mentioned above. The system shows the Sun and the Moon moving at a constant speed, and the planets move along the celestial arch as well.