What is the Antikythera Mechanism?
The antikythera mechanism is currently housed in the Greek National Archaeological Museum in Athens and is thought to be one of the most complicated antiques in existence. At the beginning of the 20th century, divers off the island of Antikythera came across this clocklike mechanism, which is thought to be at least 2,000 years old, in the wreckage of a cargo ship. The device was very thin and made of bronze. It was mounted in a wooden frame and had more than 2,000 characters inscribed all over it. Though nearly 95 percent of these have been deciphered by experts, there as not been a publication of the full text of the inscription. Today it is believed that this instrument was a kind of mechanical analog computer used to calculate the movements of stars and planets in astronomy. It has been estimated that the antikythera mechanism was built around 87 B.C and was lost in 76 B.C. No one has any idea about why or how it came to be on that ill-fated cargo ship. The ship was Roman though the
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient (150–100 BC) complex scientific calculator, often called the first mechanical computer. Crafted of bronze, the Antikythera mechanism has over 30 gears, interlocked with teeth made of equilateral triangles. Its served as a clock that included the present day of the 365-day Egyptian calendar, the Greek sign of the Zodiac, the lunar phase, a parapegma (used to show the positions of the stars), and the positions of the Sun and Moon. Contemporary investigators surmise that this information could have been used to determine other astronomical facts, such as the position of Mars and Venus. Originally discovered at the Antikythera wreck, a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, the Antikythera mechanism is heavily corroded by the sea. It was discovered in 1901, and only after more than a century of research — around 2006 — did its function become well understood. The complexity of the device has been compared to that
In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside the National Museums basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum. Freeth was a member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Projecta multidisciplinary investigation into some fragments of an ancient mechanical device that were found at the turn of the last century after two thousand years in the Aegean Sea, and have long been one of the greatmysteries of science. Freeth, a tall, taciturn man with a deep, rumbling voice, had been a mathematician at Bristol University, taking a Ph.D. in set theory, a branch of mathematical logic. He had drifted away from the academy, however, and spent most
