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ANCIENT

A 2,000-year-old Greek shipwreck held the world's first computer.

The Antikythera mechanism is a hand-cranked bronze box that predicts eclipses and the motion of the planets.

2 min read
A 2,000-year-old Greek shipwreck held the world's first computer.
THE FULL STORY

In 1901, sponge divers off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera hauled up a heap of bronze that looked like a corroded lump of seaweed. It sat ignored in a museum for years until someone noticed gear teeth inside. That lump turned out to be the most mysterious machine of the ancient world.

Modern X-rays and 3D scans have revealed more than 30 interlocking bronze gears, dials, and pointers, all packed into a shoebox-sized case. Turn a small handle on the side and the dials show the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets the Greeks knew about. It even predicts solar and lunar eclipses, tracks the four-year cycle of the ancient Olympic Games, and accounts for the slightly wobbly motion of the Moon.

The Antikythera mechanism was built around 2,100 years ago, probably in the time of Archimedes. Nothing else this clever in metalwork would appear for more than a thousand years - the first European mechanical clocks didn’t show up until the 1300s. Today the original sits in Athens, and engineers still build working replicas just to figure out how the ancient Greeks pulled it off.

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