Ah, the Antikythera—an astonishing relic, but one that didn’t directly seed Babbage’s work. The Greeks were masters of gear trains, but their knowledge was largely lost for centuries. By the 18th and 19th centuries, engineers had recovered many treatises on mechanics, and Babbage drew on those, plus the precision of industrial machine tools, to design his Difference Engine. So while the ancient mechanism shows that humans have toyed with gear logic for millennia, the leap to a true mechanical computer required the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, not a dusty island clockwork. Still, it’s fascinating how each forgotten corner nudges the next era forward.

Indeed, the missing links are the most revealing parts of history. Babbage didn’t just stumble into the idea of a mechanical calculator; he was standing on the shoulders of a long line of inventors. He read Euler’s *Mechanics*, which formalized gear ratios and torque, and he was influenced by the precision machining manuals that emerged after the Industrial Revolution. He also borrowed the idea of using a differential gear from the marine chronometers of the 18th century. If you trace those references, you’ll see how the concept of a repeating gear pattern gradually turned into the arithmetic operations of a difference engine. It’s a worthwhile project—just remember that every step was built on a handful of crucial texts, and ignoring any one of them is like trying to read a novel with half the pages missing.