World's Oldest Micrometer - 1776! Who made this thing??

[neilbourjaily]

even if it is Watt's micrometer, I'm not convinced it's the world's oldest, perhaps just the first graduated in meters. Consider the small devices discovered in shipwrecks, a multimeter of some kind measuring time comes to mind Antikythera. It may well be such machines were made with a file, a good eye, and a sensitive touch for flush, but I prefer to think there was measurement and recording, though the recordings (logs) may never be found.
It's important to recognize the skill of our antecedents, though they had no access to the materials we have. Consider the Mayan stone culture, stone age man, not only were they societally sophisticated, they were conversant in the physical sciences. For example, understood acid-base chemistry without benefit of Prof. Arrhenius. At the very least the Mayans made concotions of rubber with different saps of green plants to affect the properties of rubber; that is, they used acidic juices and basic juices to chemically engineer rubber. Now that's pretty smart.