Review: April 2009

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Sometime in the first century b.c., a heavily laden sailing vessel struck a rock off the small island now called Antikythera, just south of the Greek mainland, and went straight to the bottom. It lay there, timbers rotting away, until the autumn of 1900, when itinerant sponge divers noticed shapes of humans and horses emerging from the mud. Over the next year, with the encouragement of Greek authorities, those divers salvaged all that remained, an exquisite cargo of marble and bronze statues, jars, and gold jewelry, which today occupy a major portion of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Dazzled by the glory of those artworks, archaeologists of the time scarcely noted a remarkable yet humble-looking item in one of the wooden boxes: a few lumps of corroded metal—the remains of an elaborate assembly of interlocking gearwheels and inscribed metal plates.

Finding a geared mechanism in a wreck of such antiquity was “eerie and otherworldly,” writes science journalist Jo Marchant, “like finding a steam engine on the ancient, pitted surface of the Moon.” Although there were a few descriptions of simple screw-and-gear lifting devices in surviving classical texts, elaborate clockworks did not appear in Europe until the late Middle Ages, and mechanical calculators not until even later. The purpose of the Antikythera mechanism was unknown, though a few decipherable words on the oxide-encrusted disks hinted that it was an astronomical device. But whatever it was supposed to do, it seemed to be 1,500 years ahead of its time.

Fast forward to 1958, when a young historian of science, Derek de Solla Price of Cambridge University, first examined the Antikythera fragments at the Athens museum. Price was an expert in ancient scientific instruments, and he had come to Athens because he realized that an analysis of the operation of such an odd device “must entail a complete reestimation of ancient Greek technology.” Even though the device resisted understanding, Price remained obsessed by it, and in the 1970s, now a historian of science at Yale, he applied newly advanced X-ray and gamma-ray imaging technology to see what naked-eye inspection could not.

By counting the number of teeth on the interlocking gears, Price was gradually able to get an inkling of how the machine might have functioned as a mechanical calculator of positions of the Sun and Moon (the five known planets, too, as London Science Museum curator Michael Wright would figure out twenty years after Price’s death). It embodied a knowledge of astronomical cycles well known to have been passed down to the Greeks by the Babylonians, but the technology was far in advance of anything historians had believed the Greeks capable of.

Price died of a heart attack in 1983, but subsequent researchers, using increasingly sophisticated imaging techniques, have verified the basic thrust of his work. They continue to elaborate on the operation of the complex mechanism, scrutinizing inscriptions previously obscured by two millennia of corrosion, building real and virtual models, filling in gaps, and correcting misapprehensions. We now know, for instance, that one use of the device was to predict eclipses. Nowadays you can go on the Web and watch the ancient Greek clockwork come to life in numerous animated diagrams and modern replicas. As Marchant points out, we are still unsure who made the original, nor do we know if there were others like it. Whether it was an isolated curiosity or the lineal ancestor of the Rolex, however, the device was a work of genius—and art—to rival anything Greek culture produced in bronze, gold, or marble.