Mechanikon μηχανικόν
A museum of mechanical ideas.
Working models from the history of human thought. Each mechanism here is a browser-native simulation with primary sources cited, reconstructions marked, and inscriptions attributed. Wander from one to the next.
Mechanisms
c. 2nd century BCE · Hellenistic Greek
Antikythera Mechanism Live
A Greek cosmos in bronze. Three switchable gear-train reconstructions computing sun, moon, planets, eclipses, and the Olympic games.
1804 · Lyon, France
Jacquard Loom Live
A program woven into cards. Drop an image onto the loom and watch it weave — punched holes select which hooks rise on each pick, the cloth emerges row by row, and the lineage essay traces the line from a 1725 Lyon silk shop through Babbage and Hollerith to every stored-program machine since.
1822 · London
Babbage Difference Engine Live
A polynomial calculator in brass. Seven columns of figure wheels evaluate by finite differences — repeated addition, propagating carries you can watch ripple up each column. Enter your own polynomial, or pick from squares, cubes, pronics, tetrahedrals. Designed in 1822, never finished in Babbage's lifetime, built by the Science Museum in 1991 and 2002. Both work. Includes a side-panel essay on Babbage, Lovelace, and the 170-year wait.
1837 · London · never built
Babbage Analytical Engine Live
The general-purpose machine. A Mill (CPU), a Store (memory), separate program and data decks of Jacquard cards, conditional branches. Three executable programs in the Lovelace spirit — sum of squares, Fibonacci, factorial — each a multi-variable loop with a conditional backstep. Babbage designed it in 1837 and never built it. The first electronic computer ran a program in 1948.
1940 · Bletchley Park
Turing Bombe Live
The WW2 cryptanalytic machine that broke Enigma. Pick a German cipher (weather report, sign-off, U-boat order, plugboard variant); the Bombe brute-forces all 17,576 rotor starting positions, freezes on the recovered setting, and decrypts the message. Side-panel essay covers the Polish bomba, Turing, Welchman's diagonal board, and the road through Colossus to Manchester. The only Mechanikon sim that does something cryptographically useful.
All of time · all of humanity
Calendars of the World Live
Every system humanity has used to name a day. Twenty-seven calendars living and dead — Gregorian, Julian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Chinese, Islamic (arithmetic and Umm al-Qura), Maya (three), Japanese nengō, Myanmar, Nanakshahi, French Republican (arithmetic and astronomical), Solar Hijri (arithmetic and astronomical), Hindu Vikram (amanta and purnimanta), and more — in concentric rings and synchronised strips.
On the workbench
1872 · Glasgow
Kelvin's Tide-Predicting Machine Planned
A mechanism that is a Fourier synthesis. Pulleys and cords sum harmonic components to predict tides years in advance — each pulley is one tidal constituent (M₂, S₂, K₁, O₁). Pick a harbour, load its harmonic amplitudes, watch the tide curve emerge. Analog computation at its most graphic.
1088 · Song dynasty China
Su Song's Astronomical Clock Tower Planned
The Chinese Antikythera — a 10-metre water-powered tower with an armillary sphere, a celestial globe, and five storeys of jackwork announcing the hours. Used an escapement two centuries before European mechanical clocks. Pairs with Antikythera as the "parallel cosmologies" arc — East and West each building their own analog cosmos.
1206 · Diyarbakır, Artuqid Anatolia
Al-Jazari's Castle Water Clock Planned
From the Islamic golden age. Hydraulic gearing, zodiac display, musician automata that activate hourly. Al-Jazari's own illustrated Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices is in the public domain and visually stunning. Water flow is the distinct technical challenge — gears have been done already; this is new territory.
More
- About — what Mechanikon is and who made it.
- Methodology — how we handle reconstruction, authority, and uncertainty.
- Bibliography — consolidated sources across every mechanism.
- Colophon — technical stack, typography, palette, credits.
Mechanikon is a non-commercial cultural-heritage project. Code is MIT-licensed; prose is CC BY 4.0. Third-party attributions in the NOTICE. Research notes and strategy in docs/.