A boat carrying sponge divers met a storm in 1900 and sought sanctuary on the Aegean Sea island of Antikythera. They uncovered a 2,000-year-old wreckage while diving off the island’s shore, which is thought to be a Greek ship that sank about 60 or 70 BC. The divers recovered jewelry, ceramics, money, and bronze, and marble statues. A clump of eighty-two pieces of the tarnished bronze gadget was also pulled up.
The items were transferred to Athens’ National Museum of Archaeology for cleaning and research, but the bronze piece was too fragile to study by hand. Derek J. de Solla Price, a physicist, and professor at Yale University took note of the item and began to investigate it in 1951. He used the most advanced technology available at the time, an X-ray machine, to investigate its origin and purpose, but he still had no answers.
Price and Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos conducted X-ray and gamma-ray experiments and released a report in 1974 that specified the gear settings and inscriptions on the mechanism’s face. They felt it was made about 87 BC, which corresponded with the dates of the coins discovered, and that it may have originated in the ancient Greek city of Pergamon. Researchers first assumed it was an astronomical clock, but others argued that such a device would have been far too advanced for the period.
Because the parts were fashioned of a low-tin bronze alloy and the inscription on the item is in Koine Greek, it’s fair to conclude the device was produced in Greece. It’s unclear why it was on a cargo ship, but because scholars believe the cargo was on its way to Rome, it might have been loot from the Greek islands.
The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, which began in 2005, is an international research consortium supported by the National Archaeological Museum and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture in Athens, where the device is presently housed. Hewlett-Packard in the United States and X-Tek Systems in the United Kingdom aided the research with superior digital imaging, 3D technology, and a powerful tiny X-ray apparatus. This gadget, which was originally meant to look for minute fractures in turbine blades, allowed researchers to comprehend the minute intricacies of the letters and gears.
The Antikythera Mechanism has been dubbed “the first computer” since experts discovered it was created for the study of astronomical events, employing a mechanical, computer-like system that depicts the solar system’s cycles. The structure included basic astronomical and mathematical ideas of the time.
Cardiff University’s Professor Michael Edmunds led research into the process in 2006. He added that the gadget was “simply remarkable, the only one of its sort”. He remarked that its astronomy was “absolutely perfect” and that it was “more precious than the Mona Lisa”. Christian Carman and James Evans spent years comparing the mechanism to Babylonian eclipse records. Using a process of elimination, scientists discovered that the machine was scheduled to start in 205 BC.
On the face of the dial is a fixed ring symbolizing the ecliptic, with the twelve zodiac signs marked in equal thirty-degree sections. This followed the Babylonian practice of allocating one-twelfth of the ecliptic to each zodiac sign rather than taking into consideration the variables of the constellation borders. A moveable ring around the first dial depicts the months and days of the Sothic Egyptian calendar – 12 months of 30 days, plus five additional days dispersed throughout the year.
To operate the mechanism, a tiny hand crank was turned into the biggest gear, which was attached to a crown gear that moved the date pointer on the front dial to establish the right Egyptian day. Because the year cannot be set, the current year must be determined by examining the cycles given by several indicators in the Babylonian almanac tables for that day.
The crank advances the date pointer around 78 days in a full revolution; an auxiliary pointer traces the spiral incisions in the metal. The pointers on the dials rotated four and five times each; when the pointer reached the last month at either end of the spiral, the second pointer had to be pushed by hand to the other end. Turning the hand crank would also force the mechanism’s interlocking gears to revolve, producing simultaneous computations of the sun and moon positions, moon phase, eclipse, and calendar cycles.