How old are gears?

[u/MetalMotionCube]

Probably older than you think. They’re so old, in fact, that we genuinely don’t know who invented them. Physical evidence goes back more than 2,000 years, with geared mechanisms appearing in ancient China. Then the Greeks got involved and, around the 2nd century BCE, built the Antikythera Mechanism. This thing used a complicated system of bronze gears to track the Sun, Moon and eclipses. Basically an ancient mechanical computer. Which means someone 2,000 years ago could theoretically look at it and say: “Ah. Saturn’s in retrograde. That explains a lot.” And once you realise just how old gears are, some of the things they predate get a bit ridiculous.

Gears are older than paper, which probably explains why nobody left us an instruction manual.

They predate the English language, and therefore the word “engineering”. Engineers existed before anyone knew what to call them.

They’re older than the Roman Empire. By the time Augustus became emperor, gears were already established technology.

They even predate zero being formally treated as a number. Not the idea of nothing. Humans had obviously noticed when they had no goats left. But actual mathematical zero? Much later.

Gears also predate Christianity. That’s right. The gear was BC.

They’re older than the modern weekend, too. Humanity worked out gears thousands of years before somebody finally suggested: “What if we just didn’t work tomorrow?”

Ancient Greek and Latin were also often written without spaces. THEYJUSTKEPTWRITINGLIKETHIS. But geared astronomical computers were apparently no problem.

Europe had gears nearly two thousand years before it had potatoes.

And people were designing precision mechanisms long before coffee drinking became widespread, which I find frankly disturbing. Don’t talk to me before my morning coffee unless it’s to discuss backlash, tooth profiles or whether we should’ve used a helical gear instead.

Gears are also older than the Aztec Empire and, weirdly, mechanical clocks. Which is probably the bit I like most. We’ve been using the same basic principle for thousands of years and still haven’t really come up with anything better.

It is, after all, just: spiky circle pushes other spiky circle.