In 1900 a sponge diver was working in the Mediterranian, just off the island of Antikythera at a depth of about 138 feet. Divers had noticed various fragments of ancient cargo scattered along the bottom of this location but it was one Elias Stadaitos who discovered the source of these artifacts. Elias found the remains of a Roman cargo ship and for many months he returned to the site to find statues, pottery and interesting clumps of rock which often encrusted metalic objects.In May of 1902 an archaeologist named Valerios Stais noticed that one piece of interesting rock seemed to have what looked like a gear wheel embedded in it and set the piece aside for further inspection.
The original piece of rock was about 13 inches high, 7 inches wide and only 3 inches thick, leading many to speculate that it was probably just a piece of a much larger mechanism. There were also symbols etched in the metal which later were shown to be Greek.
Although difficult to date, the strange artifact was thought to be over two thousand years old, making it one of the earliest precision geared devices in existence. The fine teeth of the gears suggested it was some type of clock mechanism, but the complexity of the pieces also suggested that it was designed to do more than tell the time of day.
The artifact, which became known as "the Antikythera Mechanism" was largely unknown for many decades as it was meticulously cleaned. In 1951 when the encrusted rock had finally been cleared to reveal the badly eroded gears, a British scientist named Derek Price began a comprehensive study of the devices function and probably use.
The Antikythera Mechanism gained world attention when it was the cover story in Scientific American (June 1959) and was later exposed to the general public by Arthur Clarke's book Mysterious World. In Clarke's book he described the mechanism as "the world's first computer" and suggested that was capable of calculating the position of the stars and planets. This was largely disputed by historians who reminded the world that "planets" were only a vague concept of scholars around the time of Copernicus in the sixteenth century!
In the 21st Century, imaging techniques have greatly improved. We can now scan objects in 3-dimentions with CAT scans (Computer Assisted Tomography) and receive a higher resolution than with x-ray techniques. [Right: A patient about to undergo a CAT scan. Most of these improvements in imaging have been employed in medicine, to detect cancer or other pathologies.]
London based scientists Michael Wright and Allan Bromley subjected the Antikythera Mechanism to tomographic scans and discovered that the hidden gears were actually configured differently from those theorized by Price. They then began an antirely new reconstruction of the device based on this more acurate information. He showed that the device was capable of much more than had previously been imagined.
On November 30, 2006, the journal Science published a new reconstruction of the mechanism based on the high resolution tomography conducted by Wright and Bromley. Their work doubled the amount of readable characters and corrected previous translations. It was also announced that other small fragments of the device had been found and incorporated in to the new reconstruction. The latest work confirms that the device was an astronomical computer or "orrey" used to predict the positions of heavenly bodies in the sky.
