"This device is... the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful the astronomy is exactly right."
Professor Michael Edmunds, Cardiff University
One of the most remarkable inventions of the ancient world came to light in 1900 when a Greek sponge diver discovered the wreck of an ancient Greek or Roman cargo ship that had sunk off the Greek island of Antikythera around 80 B.C.E. Among the objects recovered from the wreck was a geared mechanism that, from the shape of its inscribed Greek letters, dated to between 150 and 100 B.C.E.
The mechanism has more than thirty gearwheels and three main dials. When reassembled, it formed a scientific instrument that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions of the sun, moon, and the five planets then known. When a date was entered via a crank, now lost, the mechanism calculated the position of the sun, moon, or planet. The Antikythera mechanism, as it is known, is the first known geared device and thus the first known clockwork mechanism, and the oldest known scientific instrument.
The concept "of differential gearing was not rediscovered until the sixteenth century, while the complexity and miniaturization of its parts are comparable to the finest eighteenth-century clocks. Crucially, while the mechanism is based on theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek scientists of the day, it has a heliocentric rather than the then current geocentric view of the solar system and presumes a theory of planetary motion and a knowledge of the laws of the gravity that were .not known at the time. Recent research has revealed it also organized the calendar in the four-year cycle of ancient Greek games. Whoever built this mechanism would have been astonishingly ahead of his time.
