Sponge divers off the small Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 brought up a corroded lump of bronze about the size of a shoebox. It took 120 years to admit what it actually was.
The Antikythera mechanism uses about 35 interlocking bronze gears to model the motion of the sun, moon, and (probably) the five visible planets, with a complete eclipse-prediction system based on the Saros cycle. The shipwreck dates to roughly 60 BC; the mechanism was probably built around 100 BC, in the eastern Mediterranean Greek scientific tradition associated with Hipparchus of Rhodes. Nothing of comparable mechanical sophistication is known until medieval Islamic astronomical instruments more than a thousand years later. The original existence of such a device was so improbable that the academic mainstream took most of the 20th century to accept it.
Read the full story →Sponge divers found a corroded lump of bronze in 1901. It took a hundred and twenty years to admit what it actually was.
Related questions
- What was the Antikythera mechanism designed to do?
- The Antikythera mechanism — the corroded bronze object that turned out to be a 2,000-year-old planetary computer — was recovered in 1900 from where?
- What technique in Archimedes's *Method of Mechanical Theorems* anticipated what later mathematics?
- What major scientific work was published in 1543, conventionally marking the start of the Scientific Revolution?