This is the Antikythera Mechanism. It is an OOPArt (out-of-place artifact), though you will rarely hear it described as such, as it betrays the paucity of our historical narrative. The terrain is littered with these things. OOPArts are the rule, not the exception.
From Wikipedia: "Its design and workmanship reflect a previously unknown, but not implausible, degree of sophistication."
This is a lie, a retcon. When it was found, scholars considered the device to be prochronistic, too complex to have been constructed in ancient Greece.
It sat in a museum for over 50 years because it had been dismissed. It wasn't until Yale University professor Derek J. de Solla Price became interested in it in 1951 that it was noticed.
Today its complexity is well understood. But we wouldn't even know it existed if not for the efforts of Price and his partner, Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos.
Here I would like to show you another category of OOPArt. Some artifacts appear out of place simply because no one bothered to provide a sensible background story for them. It may be called “out of place” in the sense that its origin seems to be a fabrication or at the very least, a whitewash.
Ivan Kulibin was born on 10 April 1735 in Nizhni Novgorod, southeast of Moscow, the son of a flour merchant. He belonged to the sect of Old Believers (Raskolniki), who had separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in protest against reforms undertaken by Patriarch Nikon in 1666-67. Old Believers gravitated to mines and manufactories, and self-sufficient crafts. They were often skilled in woodwork for producing tools, household implements, and ornaments. Even in this context, Kulibin displayed a surpassingly precocious interest in constructing mechanical devices.
From Russopedia—
His father, Pyotr Kulibin, wanted him to become a merchant, and accordingly made him work as a vendor, but the young Kulibin was more interested in mechanics and reading than in the family business. He turned his room into a workshop, made mechanical toys and tools for the household and for sale, and dreamed about becoming an engineer.
Nothing much of note happens between this dreamy life as a village tinkerer and the creation of the clock. With an Old Believer clergyman, he learned to read and write using the Psalter and Book of Hours and worked with his father to learn the flour trade at home. Visiting flour mills, Kulibin constructed models of machinery and water-wheels, before becoming fascinated with the tower clock of Nizhni Novgorod's Church of the Nativity and a wooden clock belonging to a neighbor, from which he
made an exact copy. The diligent young man is said to have studied mechanics, locksmithing, machining, and watchmaking from local artisans, who, seeing the young man’s desire for knowledge, freely shared their expertise with him— apparently, he wasn’t required to apprentice with them in exchange for this precious knowledge. Eventually, clock mechanisms became a special interest of his.
It was in 1769 that Kulibin was commissioned—an inexperienced, provincial, self-taught watchmaker who was known for his tinkering—to create this marvelous clock for Catherine II, assisted by the patronage of local merchant, Mikhail N. Kostromin. Let us now take a look at this unparalleled device made in the 1760s by this peasant tinkerer—
About the size of a goose egg and composed of 427 micro-mechanical parts, the egg not only showed the time but also chimed in the hours, halves, and quarters of the hour. A tiny automaton theater was enclosed within the fine golden shell. At the end of each hour, the folding doors opened, revealing a splendid golden chamber in which a performance was mechanically played out. Centurions with spears stood guard at the "Holy Sepulcher". The front of the Sepulcher was blocked with stone. Half a minute after the chamber was opened, an angel appeared, the stone moved away, the doors opened, and the warriors, stricken with terror, fell on their faces. After another 30 seconds, the "myrrh-bearing women" appeared, the bells rang, and the verse "Christ is Risen" was sung three times. At noon, the clock played the cantata composed by Kulibin in honor of the Empress. After that, during the afternoon, the clock was programmed with yet another verse: "Jesus is risen from the tomb."
Again, Kulibin was residing in Podnovye Village on the distant outskirts of the nearest developed town. His father was a petty trader. A local psalmist taught him reading, writing, and counting, and this was the only education he received aside from his own efforts to teach himself. Up until this point, there had been no indication that he could create anything similar to the clock, nothing that would make any potential investor believe he should be tasked with such a project. He just took it upon himself.
The largest local town was Nizhny Novgorod. The very first school, teaching mathematics, was opened there in 1718. In 1721 the Slavic-Greek school was founded, which in 1738 was transformed into a seminary. This is the level of development that would have been available to nobles or the children of wealthy merchants.
Kulibin is said to be self-taught. What arises in the mind is a young scholar burrowed down into dusty libraries. But what books could be available to read for the son of a petty trader in mid-eighteenth-century Russia? It is said he scoured the surrounding areas for books on mechanics. Where would such books be found? Also, how would he fund this research project?
The largest collections of books at that time were most often in monasteries. The largest library was in the Kirillov-Belozersky monastery in the 17th century. There were 473 books. In Trinity-Sergius Lavra there were 411 books in the Iosif-Volokolamsky Monastery. The possibility that advanced books on mechanical engineering would be taking up the limited space in these monasteries seems unlikely, to say the least.
Even if there were such books available, Kulibin as a peasant would have access to none of them. We are asked to believe Kulibin pulled the vast majority of his fundamental knowledge out of thin air. Relative to most accounts of “genius” characters in our past, the story of Kubilin has an almost fairy tale quality. Most other (verifiable) genius inventors we have in the historical record, even someone like Tesla, had access to all the current research and development up until the point of their own contributions.
More perspective— below you will see what would have been available at the time in the shops of local artisans, what may have been on hand for a young Kulibin to ogle as he wandered the muddy streets of his Iron Age village. This would likely be somewhat above the average technological standard of mid-1700s rural Russia.
Below we have depictions of machine shops from the 18th century. This would have been far more than what was easily at hand for Kulibin, who was not a hereditary horologist or mechanic. It is said he went to Moscow and bought watch making tools. How this was afforded as the itinerant child of a rural flour merchant is nowhere explained, it is simply glossed over.
Kulibin was, all by himself, at parity with Geneva, the clock-making capital of the world. Such a degree of industrial development, all of the prerequisite technology, had taken Switzerland centuries to prepare. Everyone else in the world that was creating any item similar had a sprawling institutional knowledge base from which to draw, which had been painstakingly developed in stages, decade by decade, over spans of hundreds years— all fully subsidized by the wealth and power of the state. But Kulibin wasn’t limited by such concerns, and Russian historians don’t even nominally address it.
Here's the thing, he didn't just make the egg. Reportedly, he was extremely prolific. Most of the wonders he made were destroyed or were "lost" (a very familiar refrain). One of the most incredible was the optical telegraph, invented by Kulibin, which would have required him to have an advanced understanding of optics and for him to have independently created his own proprietary reflective alloys. The news about this famous invention is detailed in the February 15th, 1779 issue of the Saint Petersburg Vedomosti. In the Miscellaneous News section, it was written: “a mirror made up of many parts with a special concave line, which, when only a candle is placed in front of it, produces an amazing effect, multiplying the light five hundred times against ordinary candlelight and more, depending on the number of mirror particles contained in it… The same mirror is very capable of presenting different fiery figures when these figures are carved on any plane and when the mirror is covered with this plane. The rays then, passing only into the carved wells of an opaque body, will present a very brilliant illumination, if not superior, then not inferior to the wick used in fireworks ... ".
Kulibin also invented a three-wheeled scooter with a flywheel, a brake, and a gearbox; a kind of bicycle/car that required a servant to pedal. In 1791 he rode through the streets of St. Petersburg in his three-wheeled cart. The servant inserted his feet into special “shoes”, and, pressing on them in turn, launched a complex system of levers that set the scooter in motion. I am sure it was a sight to behold, this mad peasant Archimedes clanking through the streets, accelerated by the power of gears.
Then there is the “world’s first mechanical leg” he created for an officer who lost a limb during the Ochakov assault. A description of Kulibin's prosthesis from the Moskvityanin magazine of 1854: “He made a leg of thin metal, in the form of a natural one; he overlaid it with cork bark, covered it with suede, screwed to it a flat crutch made of strong wood, reaching to the bosom, on which one could lean; he tied it where necessary with wide bandages, and fixed it so tightly that Mr. Nepeitsyn could walk very easily without a stick, sit down and get up without touching it with his hands. This machine leg bent and unbent itself in the metatarsus and knee, in accordance with the natural movement of his other leg. He could wear silk stockings, shoes, and even dance.”
It was said that the brand “Made by I.P. Kulibin” was put on many scientific instruments used in Russia in the second half of the 18th century: Many mechanisms passed through his hands: “hydrodynamic instruments", "instruments used to make mechanical experiments", optical and acoustic instruments, cooking tools, astrolabes, telescopes, spyglasses, microscopes, "electric banks" (a kind of electricity producing device), spirit levels, highly accurate scales, and many others. Kulibin invented tower clocks, a revolutionary type of single-arch bridge, minuscule “clocks in rings”, and he even constructed a new kind of elevator based on “screw mechanics” in the Winter Palace. Seemingly there was no end to his ingenuity.
To reiterate: there were no clock makers or engineers in Nizhny Novgorod— Kulibin just became one. This obscure serf self-educated and tinkered his way into crafting a mechanism at the level of Geneva in 1769. Russian historians today mark the significance of Kulibin’s astounding achievement and his contribution to Russian technological development— citing Karl Marx they point out that the clock, together with the mill, were "two material foundations on which the preparatory work for the machine industry was built inside the manufactory ... The clock is the first automaton created for practical purposes; the whole theory of the production of uniform movements was developed on it. in their character, they themselves are built on a combination of semi-artistic craft with direct theory" (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., vol. XXIII, p. 131).
The example of Kulibin seems to indicate that the Russians didn’t really have to put much effort into their historical narratives, perhaps because no one was really required to believe it. Was the real Kulibin another John Dee or Rasputin character, and his inventions the result of channeling or automatic writing? Or is Kulibin a complete fabrication? It is important to realize the simple fact that in the 18th century, the exchange of information between scientists and engineers from different countries was extremely limited. I can find no contemporary mention of Kulibin outside of Russia, so it is indeed possible he is a rather recent revision, a convenient peasant inventor to inspire the workers. Though rich in “history”, Russia, in general, has this very thin, flimsy documented history before the 19th century. Have we wandered behind the facade of a historiographical Potemkin village?
What is truly startling is that Kulibin wasn’t the only self-taught peasant inventor in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were a multitude with the same backstory! To name a few: Fyodor Blinov (1827-1902) inventor of the first tracked vehicle, Leonty Shamshurenkov (1687-1758) who designed a device for lifting the Tsar Bell onto a bell-tower constructed in 1752 and the first self-propelling or self-running carriage, the astronomer Fedor Alekseevich Semenov (1794-1860), Fedor Nikiforovich Slepushkin (1763-1848) the self-taught poet, self-taught Konstantin Tsiolkovsky discovered the kinetic properties of gases and invented most of Russian rocket science. Egor Grigorievich Kuznetsov, from a family of serfs in the Urals, developed rolling mills for the metal plants of Nizhnii Tagil. Terentii Ivanovich Voloskov (1729-1806) fabricated astronomical clocks and telescopes, while the Tver peasant mechanic, Lev Fedorovich Sabakin (1746-1813), went to England to train in steam engineering before returning to Russia to oversee mechanized manufactories in St Petersburg and Tver. None of these men received a formal education, most were born to families with no wealth in a society with zero upward mobility. All these self-taught ‘geniuses’ in a country that didn’t have libraries or public schools until relatively recently.
In the example of the Russian hero genius Kulibin, it is revealed how much easier it is to plainly see how other countries establish their foundational myths through politically constructed historical narratives. It is much harder to uncover our own integral civil parables, as they interpolate themselves in the depths of our own self-image creation. But perhaps there is more to this story than just "fake history”. It could be said that all these men really were self-taught geniuses, that they learned about chemistry, mechanics, and astronomy from the great book of ‘nature’. Some philosophies maintain that through careful and humble observation of God’s creation, some part of the mysteries of the cosmos may be revealed. Or one could ambitiously posit that all of their knowledge was inspired directly through channeling, in mystical trance states, or in conversations with angelic entities. I believe we can find a clue in the following excerpt:
Nicolaus Fuss, wrote to Daniel Bernoulli on 5 January 1777:
. . . the academic technician Kulibin merits your knowing of him by the
astonishing fact that from a simple peasant he has developed into a genuinely
remarkable person through a happy predisposition for the art of mechanics
bestowed on him by nature, so that without any outside help he has already
created masterpieces and caused the public to be delighted with him and his
[bridge] model, on which he works incessantly.
Fuss was undoubtedly impressed with Kulibin's work here, but he did not present Kulibin as intellectually skilled, but rather as a 'technician' (mekhanik) having a 'happy predisposition for ... art'. Fuss also associated Kulibin with the peasantry and nature, making him a form of 'noble savage' among craftsmen, whose talents were not of his own making but 'bestowed on him by nature'. Elsewhere, Fuss claimed that Kulibin was 'indebted [for] his higher knowledge only to some kind of instinct'. Theacademician Johann Georgi likewise described Kulibin in this manner, as 'a man with an exceptional gift for mechanics'.
—History of Technology Volume 29
Perhaps Kulibin and all these other Russian inventors belong to an ancient, now-extinct guild. The Guild of the Wild Autist. Is it possible that man in his uncorrupted form is able to hunt through the assemblage of cosmic gear-works, not by “schooling”, but by instinct alone? This ‘spirit of use’ extends itself into the mechanic arts (which obey natural laws), manifesting as an innate ‘sense of command’— recognizing on sight that the machine is your servant, that you are not below the tool, but stand over the wheel. Perhaps there is a timeline approaching where we shall reject the alien gods of “information” and “education”, returning to the heart of invention, to brutish tinkering and the genius of the savage.
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
—Psalm 139:14-16
This article, though it may have been one of your shorter ones, was a joy to read! It makes me think to your other pieces on ancient technologies, great arrayed mirrors that could set boats on the shore ablaze. To our forgotten memories. How did our ancestors come to these great inventions? God's divine light can be very revealing if we open our eyes, to paraphrase Aquinas.
Thanks for another solid article. Look forward to the next one! :D
This reminded me of Aryton Senna and Marco White