The Antikythera Mechanism: The Bronze Cosmos That Should Not Have Existed
In the spring of 1901, a team of sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera decided to try their luck in the deep water below. What they found on the seabed was the wreck of an ancient ship, a Roman-era vessel that had gone down some two thousand years before, laden with treasures it had been carrying across the Mediterranean: bronze and marble statues, glassware, coins, and jewelry. The divers hauled up a fortune in classical art, and the museum in Athens set to cataloguing it. Amid the marble limbs and corroded bronzes, someone noticed an unremarkable lump of calcified rock and green metal, about the size of a small book, that had split open to reveal what looked impossibly like a gear wheel. It was set aside as a curiosity. It would turn out to be the single most astonishing object ever recovered from the ancient world — a device so advanced that its very existence forced historians to rewrite what they believed the ancients could do. A Machine ...