The History Behind: The Antikythera Mechanism
Does a “Computer” Found at the Bottom of the Ocean Prove the Ancients Were More Advanced Than We Ever Imagined?
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It was in 1900 that sponge divers made one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries all time while diving off Point Glyphadia on the Greek island of Antikythera. 148 feet below the surface of the crisp blue Mediterranean was the wreck of a Roman cargo vessel, inside were many large ancient artefacts. There were bronze and marble statues, unique glass, jewellery and coins. These things alone would have been a fantastic find. However, in 1901, something else was found — an ancient form of a computer. It would change everything historians knew about the ability of the ancients.
It isn’t known how the Antikythera Mechanism came to be in the Roman ship, and some have speculated the item was plunder, being taken to form part of a parade by a triumphant Caesar in Rome. Some believe the device to have been the work of Hipparchus of Rhodes, though ancient sources suggest that Archimedes may have been ultimately responsible. After discovering the gears, archaeologists believed that the device was an astronomical clock. Still, it was far more complicated than that, and few thought it could ever have been built at the same time as everything else that was being pulled from the wreck. It would later be dated to around the second century BC.
Investigations into the problematic piece were dropped, the device primarily ignored and written off until 1951 when the eminent British physicist and historian of science Derek John de Solla Price became interested in what the discovery had actually been. Price and the Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos published an extensive paper in 1974 under the title Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism, a Calendar Computer from c. 80 BC. The comprehensive 70-page work included x-rays and gamma-ray images of the device and laid out how it may have worked. Price was the first to conclude that the Antikythera Mechanism had been used to predict the position of planets and stars dependent on the month. He…
