Time seems perpetual during 2020! Team CTF@UConn celebrated the new beginning with an ancient perpetual calendar (Antikythera Mechanism) that shares some core functionalities as the gear turbo fan!

From Prof. Lee Langston’s article “Gears Steer New Engine Designs“: Gear trains are one of the oldest known machines and none is more closely identified by the general public, with the profession of mechanical engineering. Gears use the principle of the lever to alter the speed and torque carried by shafts, and can be traced back as far as 3000 BC in use in China. One of the most famous of ancient gear assemblies is the Antikythera Mechanism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism), recovered in 1900 from a shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Possibly constructed in Rhodes in 150-100 BC, the mechanism is an astronomical analog calculator (or orrery) that was probably used as one of the first analog computers to show celestial positions of the sun and moon, the time of solar eclipses and the dates of Olympic and Pan-Hellenic games. The Antikythera Mechanism has some 30 intermeshing gears, which include an epicyclic gear train.