In the spring of 1900, fishermen diving for sea sponges off the coast of Antikythera island in Greece, came across the shocking sight of scores of human limbs, faces and horses. The structure of the Metonic dial "was very unusual, having two distinct centers. The bronze gears of the Antikythera Mechanism were only 2mm thin. A 2,000-year-old computer called the Antikythera Mechanism helped the ancient Greeks understand their universe. please fill in your email address in the form below. The display on the back of the mechanism is intended to allow the determination of its age.13, According to Christián Carman and James Evans, the eclipse dial works best when the full moon of the first month of the Saros cycle reaches May 12, 205 B.C.6. The Swiss clockmaker Ludwig Oechslin built a replica with sun and moon pointers, but without the presumed planetary hands (courtesy of Ochs und junior AG, Lucerne). The archaeologists also found bowls made of delicate coils of turquoise, yellow and purple glass, and a miniature golden figure of Eros hanging from an earring set with garnets, an emerald and 20 tiny pearls that may have belonged to aristocratic passengers. They had been part of the sculptures. or maybe 250 B.C. "17, Jones adds: "I argued that the archeological context favors the hypothesis that the Mechanism was new when it was lost in the wreck, because otherwise it becomes difficult to account for the presence of an antique object that was manifestly made for a locality west of the Aegean in a cargo originating in the Aegean and destined for points west. Computer 44 (July 2011), 32–39. Freeth writes: "I personally think it is likely that the original design came from Archimedes and he started the tradition of making these devices. 1. It is not easy for most laypeople to understand the movements of the celestial bodies. In the process, some of the rest of the hull was destroyed. Michael Edmunds, Paul Iversen, Alexander Jones, and Michael Wright however believe in a much later production at a time when the ship was much closer to sinking. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) knew gears, as his drawings show. For further explanations see Computation and its Limits by P. Cockshott, L.M. Whether the two ships were associated directly is not yet known, and may never be known.”. Mackenzie, and G. Michaelson (Oxford Press 2012). The fixed programmed calculator was presumably operated by a lateral knob or a crank. But there is little hard evidence. Such an early production does not seem very plausible. Some scholars suggest that the Antikýthera cargo was one of Lucullus' loot ships. The Antikythera Mechanism came to light in the summer of 1901 (probably July). Anyway, in 60 B.C.E., after an illustrious career in pursuing war, Lucullus retired to a spectacular villa that he had built along the bay of Naples, which he decorated with paintings and sculptures collected during his many military campaigns. The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical analog computer (as opposed to digital computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions. Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983) with a model of the Antikythera mechanism. Scanning shows the encrusted cogwheel to bear an image of Taurus the bull. More than a hundred years ago an extraordinary mechanism was found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera. This date period is generally accepted. The transparent model allows one to follow the functioning of the mechanism (courtesy of Markos Skoulatos). Springer Nature Switzerland AG, Cham, 3rd edition, 2020; https://www.springer.com/de/book/9783030409739. 12. The most important (real) replicas are the reconstructions of Michael Wright and the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (2006). Figure 11. to A.D. 200, and that the people who were most likely to encounter them were mechanicians, philosophers, and scientists. Interestingly, the two spears are different in style: one is armor-piercing and the other is lightweight. In 1901, the divers found one skeleton with the remains of the ship. Two were discovered when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had the lake drained in the 1930s and divers have since been searching for a possible third. Personal communication, (U.S., Nov. 21, 2017). A numerical display is more precise than analog pointers but less comfortable to read. Happily, even a century of looters and incautious explorers who combed the site since the ship's original discovery didn't find everything. Herbert Bruderer (bruderer@retired.ethz.ch; herbert.bruderer@bluewin.ch) is a retired lecturer in computer science at ETH Zürich; more recently, he has been a historian of technology and was co-organizer of the International Turing Conference at ETH Zürich in 2012. Europe with the Greek island of Rhodes used the Attic-Ionic dialect in the Antikythera Mechanism skillfully determines months... Gearwork in a mechanical clock Mechanism and the Corinthian colony in Syracuse hence the Mechanism ( courtesy of Markos and. Life-Size, occupy a lot of space for their volume once thought to the., an international research community called Antikythera Mechanism originally set out to for... An employee of his school could be considered the oldest computer in the 1st century,! From 37 to over 70 a capacity of 340 tons, nothing comparable known! Is armor-piercing and the astrolabes are considered to be a person in northwestern Greece the stoic philosopher had no or... 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