When a group of fishermen dived into a wrecked ship in the treacherous coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900, no one knew that they will come out of the water with a significant find. The oldest computer in the world.
It was only two years later that a politician named Spirydon Stais visited the museum where the treasures were placed, and happened to catch the attention of a lump of metal. Eventually, that piece of metal was discovered to be an ancient computer, later coined as the Antikythera Mechanism.
What looks like something usually found in a junkyard is actually a mechanism, which is a set of rusted brass gears sandwiched into a rotting wooden box the size of a mantel clock. As observed, there are at least two dozen gears laid neatly on top of each other, calibrated with the precision of a master-crafted Swiss swatch.
Photo by Anthony Ayiomamiti
Archaeologists estimated that the Antikythera Mechanism is 2,000 years old. They say that the technology would usually date to the 16th century.
There was a problem though: for a long time, it was unknown as to what it was used for. Researchers at the time believed that it can only be a clock, calendar, or calculating device.
Until in 1959, Princeton science historian Derek J. de Solla Price gave the most thorough scientific analysis of the mechanism even up to now. He investigated on the gears and said that the mechanism was used to predict the position of the planets and stars in the sky depending on the calendar month. There was a main gear that could be moved to represent the calendar year. Moving this allows approximations of the positions of celestial objects like the planets, sun, and moon, which are represented by the smaller gears.
Video by Antikythera’s YouTube
The mechanism was ruled out by Price to be a computer in an issue of Scientific American.
He said, “The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock … or like a modern analogue computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation.”
It was fair to call the Antikythera Mechanism a computer because it is able to compute the position of the celestial bodies through the code written into the mathematical ratios of its gears. It only needs to be inputted with a few simple variables like setting the main date on one gear, it performs complicated mathematical calculations on its own. There are now many reconstructions of the mechanism to show how it works.
Video by Heritage Key Media
Photo via Histoire des Sciences
What is more surprising about this computer is that in the 2000s, researchers found that there are text inscribed on parts of the mechanism that had never been seen before. Written in legible ancient Greek, the text was like an instruction manual for the device.
As to who exactly used and manufactured this kind of computer, nobody knows just yet. But the ancient Greeks as a whole takes the credit – after all, they known to be great in mathematics and sciences.
Regardless, the Antikythera Mechanism is now considered as the world’s oldest computer.
