antikythera computer

The Antikythera Computer

In 1901 divers working off the isle of Antikythera off the coast of Greece
in the Mediterranean found the remains of a clocklike mechanism 2,000
years old. It consisted of lots of bronze gears and dials in a wooden
casing. Unfortunately in the early 1900s the art of preserving ancient
wood from the seabed was not well understood, and the wooden casing
soon fell to bits. The bronze gearing was far too corroded to be taken to
bits, cleaned up, and made to work, but it was possible to discover its structure by X-raying it. The whole
device had consisted of a book-shaped box with many dials on the face, and an extremely complex set of
gears inside. The mechanism seemed to have been cut from a sheet of bronze about 2mm thick, and all
the gears were cut with the same tooth angle of 60 degrees, so that any gear will mesh with any other.
There is evidence of bits of having broken and been repaired, so it appears to have been used.
Ptolemy published his famous ``Tetrabiblos'' around 200BC, which summarised the state of knowledge
in astronomical calculation of the time. The planets move through the sky in a rather odd fashion, with a
kind of scything motion, where they keep moving backwards for a while before moving forwards again.
This is because the Earth goes round the Sun, and sometimes overtakes the planet, so that it seems to
move backwards in the sky for a while every so often, before resuming its forward motion. The visible
planet which has the most extreme scything motion was Saturn (Cronos), hence the representation of
Father Time or Death with his scythe, the scything motion of Saturn in the sky being taken to represent
the reaping of the harvest of human souls when their mortal time had expired.
Ptolemy thought everything revolved around the Earth, so this scything motion was accounted for by
supposing that planets were carried on little revolving wheels (valled epicycles) attached to the rim of
larger revolving wheels. The Antikythera mechanism contains gears which are carried around on other
gears in just this way, i.e., it contained epicyclic gears.

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The mechanism appears to have been a device for calculating the motions of stars and planets. It could
be set to a particular date, and the positions of the Sun, Moon, and visible planets, read off the dials. (In
fact this is a simplification -- its dials produced some of these positions, and other dials produced periods
useful in astronomical calculations, such as for predicting eclipses.) Not all of the mechanism has been
decoded. Above is a diagram of what has been decoded and understood. Below you will find the same
part of the mechanism in side view, and below again, a working reconstruction of that part of the
mechanism.
There is no doubt that the ancient Greeks had the astronomical and mathematical knowledge. It was
startling to discover that they had the capability to build this kind of very sophisticated mechanism, far
surpassing in complexity anything built later until the astronomical clocks of the Middle Ages. In fact it
was so startling that although Derek de Solla Price's ``Gears from the Greeks'' was published in 1975, it
has since then been largely ignored by classical historians. It was too much of an anomaly. Probably it

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was a dating mistake they supposed, a more modern device which fell off a boat and has been misdated.
After all, if the Greeks had built things like this, we would have found references to it, descriptions, in
ancient Greek literature, and we don't.

On the other hand, perhaps there are descriptions, but, not understanding the device, nor suspecting its
existence, the descriptions hadn't been recognised for what they were? In fact some now suggest that the
epicyclic view of the universe, in which it was envisaged that the planets were carried around the
heavens on vast celestial gears which carried smaller epicyclic gears, which carried even smaller
epicyclic gears, and so on, was in fact inspired by having seen such mechanisms. After all, given that we
know one existed, it is very likely that at least a few other similar devices were made. Essentially the
mechanism was the translation into the form of meshing gears of calculations ancient astronomers of the
time actually used to work out where planets etc. would be at given dates. And of course, the people
most likely to see such machines would be mathematicians and astronomers.
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There are in ancient Greek texts a number of passages which have always been very obscure, which
contain a great many numbers along with references to Gods, appearances and disappearances. These
have always been considered to have been mystical numerological mumbo-jumbo, but scholars with an
engineering and mathematical bent are now looking up these passages again, to see if they might be
descriptions of the Antikythera mechanism, or of other complex geared devices.
Later research by de Solla Price's son suggests that the mechanism was built in Rhodes, which at the
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time was a centre of scientific and technological research and development.

Chris Malcolm March 1999

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