Long before tablets and notebooks and even laptops there were analog computers.
Alan Turing was credited with being the inventor of the first computer, when he set out to design a machine that would crack the German’s Enigma cypher machine.
Only he wasn’t the first.
The Ancient Greeks were.
In April 1900, sponge divers discovered an ancient wreck off Point Glyphadia on the island of Antikythera.
They found bronze and marble statues, coins, jewellery … and a lump of corroded bronze and wood.
For decades it went largely ignored in the Athens museum where the finds were sent.
But then in 1971 archaeologist Derek de Solla Price became interested in it and asked a Greek nuclear physicist named Charalampos Karakalos to take X-ray and gamma-ray images of the 82 fragments.
What he discovered astonished everyone.
Now known as the the Antikythera Mechanism, the lump of badly corroded metal and wood turned out to be a complex mechanism composed of at least 30 meshing bronze gears.
It was in fact the remains of an ancient analog computer, designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses as well as the cycles of Olympic Games. It was designed perhaps as early as 200 BC.
The quality and complexity of the mechanism’ manufacture suggests it has undiscovered predecessors; its construction relied upon theories of astronomy and mathematics first developed by Greek astronomers.
All its instructions are written in Koine Greek (how it works is certainly all Greek to me).
How did it find its way to the bottom of the ocean?
It has been suggested that it was being taken to Rome, together with other treasure looted from the island, to support a triumph for Julius Caesar.
Second question: where did it come from?
The concept for the mechanism could have originated in Corinth, as some of the astronomical calculations indicate observations that can be made only from there. The school of Archimedes had been established there, at Syracuse.
Cardiff University professor Michael Edmunds, who led a 2006 study of the mechanism, described the device as ” the only thing of its kind”, and said he regarded it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.’
As a computer however, it’s not particularly accurate, the Mars pointer being up to 38° off at times.
This is not due to design inaccuracies but rather to limitations in Greek theory at that point in time, which could not have been improved until Ptolemy introduced the equant three or four hundred years later, and then when Johannes Kepler broke from the concept of uniform motion in 1609 AD.
The limitations of the hand-built gears would probably also have swamped the finer solar and lunar calculations mechanisms built into it.
but the Antikythera Mechanism bears witness to a lost history of brilliant engineering and scientific knowledge; it is a a conception of pure genius, one of the great wonders of the ancient world - it just didn’t really work very well!
But that’s not the point. The really intriguing question is this: how was such astounding knowledge lost to the world?
Technological advances approaching this level of complexity did not appear again in Europe until the development of mechanical astronomical clocks in the 14th century.
So what happened?
We may never know.
Unless we get a computer to work it out for us.
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