Though it it
seemed to be just a corroded lump of some sort when it was found in a shipwreck
off the coast of Greece near Antikythera in 1900, in 1902 archaeologist
Valerios Stais, looking at the gear embedded in it, guessed that what we now
call the “Antikythera mechanism” was some kind of astronomy-based clock.
He was in
the minority—most agreed that something so sophisticated must have entered the
wreck long after its other 2,000-year-old artifacts. Nothing like it was
believed to have existed until 1,500 years later.
In 1951,
British historian Derek J. de Solla Price began studying the find, and by 1974
he had worked out that it was, in fact, a device from 150 to 100 BC Greece. He
realized it used meshing bronze gears connected to a crank to move hands on the
device’s face in accordance with the Metonic cycle, the 235-month pattern that
ancient astronomers used to predict eclipses.
By 2009,
modern imaging technology had identified all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism’s
gears, and a virtual model of it was released.
Understanding
how the pieces fit goes together confirmed that the Antikythera mechanism was
capable of predicting the positions of the planets with which the Greeks were
familiar—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—as well as the sun and moon,
and eclipses. It even has a black and white stone that turns to show the phases
of the moon. Andrew Carol, an engineer from Apple, built a (much bigger)
working model of the device using Legos to demonstrate its operation.
In June of
2016, an international team of experts revealed new information derived from
tiny inscriptions on the devices parts in ancient Greek that had been too tiny
to read—some of its characters are just 1/20th of an inch wide—until
cutting-edge imaging technology allowed it to be more clearly seen. They’ve now
read about 35,00 characters explaining the device.
The writing
verifies the Antikythera mechanism’s capabilities, with a couple of new
wrinkles added: The text refers to upcoming eclipses by color, which may mean
they were viewed as having some kind of oracular meaning. Second, it appears
the device was built by more than one person on the island of Rhodes, and that
it probably wasn’t the only one of its kind. The ancient Greeks were apparently
even further ahead in their astronomical understanding and mechanical know-how
than we’d imagined.
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