Is Antikythera Mechanism The Missing Enigma Of The Ancient World

Antikythera Mechanism may be the lost ancient technology that could make modern computers even better

Antikythera Mechanism in an exhibit at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Discovery Of the Mechanism

In the summer of 1900, during the time of easter, a crew of Greek sponge divers led by Captain Dimitrios Kontos was sailing along the shores of North Africa. There was a storm brewing hence they stopped at Antikythera Island till the storm cleared off. During their time there some of the crew members started diving from the island’s coast wearing their diving suits one of the divers signaled to be pulled to the surface just after reaching a depth of 45 beneath the sea level. He said to found a large dump of rotten corpses by the seafloor. Captain Kontos, who couldn’t believe what his crew member said, thought he was bluffing due to the nitrogen toxicity that occurs in that depth. Captain Kontos donned his suit and dived off the coast to have a look for himself after a while he returned to the surface with an arm of a bronze statue. They were shocked at the discovery but had to abandon their finding halfway as the skies cleared for them to continue their planned sponge fishing.

Later that year, by the end of their fishing season they returned to the island to continue their salvage with the support of Greek navy vessels through the whole next year of 1901. They retrieved several artifacts, bronze statues, and metal coins , along with several other historically valuable artifacts, which was the discovery of a seemingly insignificant small artifact called the ‘Antikeythera Mechanism’. 

During the time it was first discovered, it was largely ignored as nothing more than a piece of rock with a lot of moss growing on it. It was only in the summer of 1902 that the archeologist Valerios Stais found that there were intricate gears embedded in the rocks which were largely ignored before. Then, for the next half a century, people couldn’t decipher the mechanism and how it worked, but most of the archeologists at that time thought that it was some sort of astronomical clock.

In 1971, nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos made X-ray and Gamma-ray studies on the 82 fragments of the mechanism and published his findings in 1974. There was another fragment that is thought to be a part of the mechanism is a wheel with an image of a bull embedded in it, which may have been a cogwheel of the Antikythera Mechanism. The latter was only found in the latest expedition conducted between 2012 to 2015.

What Is Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera mechanism is one of the oldest versions of what we call a modern-day analog computer. An analog computer is a computer that solves mathematical equations by performing an analog operation within its machinery. For example, when you want to solve the equation of damped oscillation, a modern-day electronic analog computer performs an ‘analog’ motion in its electronic circuits where the voltage across the circuit oscillates (Alternating current) according to the equation of the damped oscillations.

Antikythera mechanism is very different from computers that you’re using to read this article right now for that matter, most of the modern-day computer that is being manufactured and in use today are digital computers. A digital computer is made up of different technology known as digital computing. As the name suggests, digital computing works by taking in information as binary ‘digits’ of 0s and 1s and processes the information by manipulating the digits in these digits in their circuits (logic gates) using some fixed rules. So if we try to solve a mathematical problem similar to that one we saw on an analog computer we need to translate the problem to a language that can be understood by digital computers which is the binary. By translating the mathematical problem to the binary language you’re essentially converting the existing problem into a new problem that the computer is capable of solving which can be converted to obtain the solution of the original problem. There are various advantages and disadvantages to this type of computing but that could make up an entirely new article.

Why was it made?

The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be constructed as an astronomical clock. It is a mechanical analog computer, it uses a set of 37 bronze gears arranged in a complex alignment. The gears rotate at various speeds in a combination analog to how planets move around the ancient geocentric model of the sky. The available records suggest that the geocentric model was proposed by Anaximander of Greece in the 6^th century BC which is in line with the proposed time of the making of the mechanism which places its origins in around the 2^nd century BC. The mechanism is said to be accurate to the models of planetary movement at the time of its construction.  

The mechanism was first recovered in six fragments. From them, one of the fragments is said to be the major fragment and consisted of the majority of the gears about 27 of them, and the remaining five are minor fragments containing just one gear each. The mechanism when fully reconstructed consists of gears rotating at different speeds, each of these gears could denote one complete movement of the classical planets and the sun in the sky. The advantage of this over that of our modern day-to-day is that our calendar largely ignores the lunar and other planetary cycles. Whereas the Antikythera mechanism can give the accurate duration of most of the planetary cycles hence it is very useful in predicting the exact date and time of the full moons and various other alignments in the night sky.

How accurate is the mechanism?

Scientists such as Freeth and Jones who did extensive research and examination of the machinery and the engineering of the mechanism believed that the mechanism was theoretically pretty accurate in its predictions of the duration of various planetary cycles with an exception of the Martian cycle where it seemed to be off by about 38 degrees from time to time. They concluded that said inaccuracy was not due to any mechanical errors in the gear size ratio rather it is due to the incomplete understanding of the movement of the planets at that time which was later improved by Ptolemy and further much later by Kepler. Added to the theoretical inaccuracy is that the mechanical inaccuracy of the hand-made gears.

A computer-generated image of the
the front panel of Freeth model.

Despite all the inaccuracies, the mechanism is a remarkable piece of achievement for its time. The complex system of gear arrangement was seen again only after more than 1000 years in medieval Europe’s clock designs. The mechanism also suggests that the people at that time had access to more mathematical knowledge than was previously thought this is obvious from the fact that the gears ratio matching perfect planetary cycles may have been possible only with the knowledge of pi to many decimal places. This may have been given by Archimedes in the 2^nd century BC and his contribution to the development of calculus may have propelled the mechanism’s development. 

Recent recreation of the
the front panel of the Mechanism.

Although the remarkable precision suggests that the mechanism should have exceeded the expectation of the technology at that time by quite a large degree and the technology may have been lost soon after the shipwreck not to be rediscovered for the next thousands of years. These accomplishments cannot be understated to think that the mechanism was designed thousands of years before the knowledge of elliptical orbits of planets and Kepler’s laws is quite remarkable indeed.