BinaryWolf

Antikythera Mechanism

How does technological innovation disappear for so long and then reappear in another form centuries later?

It looks like something from another world — nothing like the classical statues and vases that fill the rest of the echoing hall. Three flat pieces of what looks like green, flaky pastry are supported in perspex cradles. Within each fragment, layers of something that was once metal have been squashed together, and are now covered in calcareous accretions and various corrosions, from the whitish tin oxide to the dark bluish green of copper chloride. This thing spent 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea before making it to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and it shows…This is the Antikythera Mechanism. These fragments contain at least 30 interlocking gear-wheels, along with copious astronomical inscriptions. Before its sojourn on the sea bed, it computed and displayed the movement of the Sun, the Moon and possibly the planets around Earth, and predicted the dates of future eclipses. It’s one of the most stunning artefacts we have from classical antiquity.

No earlier geared mechanism has ever been found and nothing close to its sophistication appears again for well over a thousand years.

“It’s still a popular notion among the public, and among scientists thinking about the history of their disciplines, that technological development is a simple progression,” he (Francois Charette) says. “But history is full of surprises.”

Read more about the mystery of the Antikythera Mechanism at Nature.