A diver exploring a shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, an island between the Greek mainland and Crete, brings up a heavily encrusted mechanism that turns out to be the world’s first known scientific instrument.
The Antikythera mechanism plotted the positions of celestial bodies nineteen years into the future. A dictionary-size assemblage of thirty-seven interlocking dials crafted with the precision and complexity of a nineteenth-century Swiss clock, the machine has been dated to approximately 150 BCE.
Scientists painstakingly reverse-engineered the mechanism, deciphered the script etched on its housing—the world’s first instruction manual—and pieced the fragments into physical and later digital models. Most recently, they’ve made a working replica.
They determined that the mechanism predicted future positions of the moon and sun, and perhaps other planets. But that’s not all: Tony Freeth and his Antikythera Mechanism Research Project colleagues found a tiny dial labeled with the locations of Olympic competitions. The feature was probably not integral to its function, said Freeth, but a stylish demonstration of the machine’s power, like a watch that displays stock prices. The Olympics were of paramount importance to ancient Greeks, who labeled years in relation to ongoing Olympiads and suspended wars for the games’ duration.
“We haven’t found anything on the instrument that suggests it was used for astrology, which was suggested in the past,” he said. “I think the maker was showing off a huge amount of knowledge and skill. They demonstrated that you could take these theories about how astronomical bodies move, and make a machine that would calculate them. That was a completely revolutionary idea.”
The mechanism is a forerunner of all scientific instrumentation. Though its functions are understood, said Freeth, its application remains unknown: “We can only look at the result, and the result is dazzling.”—BK