But their efforts soon turned to discovering more about how the device worked. In the meantime, Mike Edmunds, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University, UK, and his friend Tony Freeth, a mathematician-turned-film-maker living in London, decided the mechanism would make a fantastic subject for a documentary. The two researchers took around 700 images of the fragments, and Wright has been working on a reconstruction that supercedes Price's ever since.ĭerek de Solla Price tried to undo the Antikythera Mechanism's secrets. As the fragments could not be moved from the museum, and Bromley didn't have the money to ship a tomography machine to Athens, Wright used his tool-making skills to build a crude tomograph in situ. Bromley wanted to study the machine with X-ray tomography, which assembles a sheaf of cross-sections of its subject. Wright ended up working with Allan Bromley, a computer scientist at Sydney University in Australia who had become interested in the Antikythera Mechanism at around the same time. Studying the astronomically enhanced sundial led Wright to Price's treatment of the Antikythera Mechanism, in which he saw serious holes. Curator Michael Wright realized the device was a Byzantine sundial from the sixth century AD, which also contained a simple geared mechanism that drove pointers showing the position of the Moon and Sun in the sky. That same year, a Lebanese man walked into the Science Museum in London with the pieces of another ancient mechanism in his pocket. They largely ignored Price's work, and he died in 1983. “He understood the essence of what it was - an astronomical computer.” But Price massaged some of the data (much to the annoyance of Karakalos and his wife), and his reconstruction was unnecessarily complicated - perhaps too complicated for historians and archaeologists. “Price really put the mechanism on the map,” says Tony Freeth, co-author of a new reconstruction of the device (see page 587). Karakalos and his wife Emily painstakingly counted the visible teeth in 1974 Price published a heroic 70-page account of the machine (D. The British science historian Derek de Solla Price and the Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos made X- and gamma-ray images of the fragments in 1971. The gears elicited interest, but it was not until investigations delved beneath the surface that the box started to yield its secrets.
Ancient works lost to time cracked#
But as the wood dried and shrivelled, the lump cracked open, and on, archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that there were gear-wheels inside. The Antikythera wreck was to yield a stunning collection of bronze and marble statues, pottery, glassware, jewellery and coins it was also to claim the life of one of the divers, not yet aware of the risk of the bends when diving with an oxygen hose.Īs busy museum staff struggled to piece together statues and vases, a formless, corroded lump of bronze and wood lay unnoticed.
After grabbing the larger-than-life arm of a bronze figure as proof of his find, he returned to the surface to inform his companions.
Instead of sponges nestled on the sea bed, the shape of a great ship loomed out of the blue. Once the winds had eased, Elias Stadiatis dived 42 metres to a rocky shelf to look for late additions to his hard-earned haul. In 1900 a party of Greek sponge divers sought shelter from a storm in the lee of the barren, rocky islet of Antikythera. Most texts leave out vital technical details, so you need skills to be transmitted directly. As François Charette, a historian of science at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, points out, “for the translation of technology, you can't rely solely on texts”. It's tempting to think that some mechanisms, or at least the ability to build them, came west at the same time. Shortly after that, mechanical clocks appeared in the West, although nobody knows exactly where or how. Wright, though, favours the idea that they are linked by an unbroken tradition: “I find it as easy to believe that this technology survived unrecorded, as to believe that it was reinvented in so similar a form.” The timing of the shift to the West might well have been driven by the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, after which much of the caliphate's knowledge spread to Europe. It could be argued that the similarities between the medieval technology and that of classical Greece represent separate discoveries of the same thing - a sort of convergent clockwork evolution.
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