The Claim
The first computer is over 2000 years old
The Antikythera Mechanism is something that anyone interested in weird things would likely have heard of, and remains one of the most fascinating and out of place ancient devices ever found.
Found in a Roman shipwreck 148 feet below the surface in 1900 by Greek sponge divers, the device went unnoticed for years, appearing as nothing more than a chunk of heavily corroded copper. The wreck itself had a number of interesting items on it, such as statues, coins and jewelry which were all taken to the National museum of Archaeology in Athens to be logged and stored.
At the time it was considered very low priority as no one knew what it was and instead focused on putting the statues back together and analysing the coins. Two years later someone noticed a cog inside the device but most scholars at the time declared it to be to advanced for Roman era and deemed it belonging to a later time, somehow making it onto the wreck by coincidence.
Interest was lost in the device until 1951 when a British Yale professor Derek J. de Solla Price, picked up interest again and studied the object, but due to the technology of the day and not being allowed to take it apart didn’t get very far. It wasn’t until 1971 when a proper investigation into the device took place, when it was scanned by Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos with x-ray and gamma-ray images, finding a total of 82 fragments.
So how old is it?
Price claims that the inscriptions and markings on the various parts indicate that it was made in 87 BC and lost only a few years later according to the carbon dating. It seems it was being taken from the Greek island of Rhodes to Rome as part of looted treasure, and most likely ran into a storm with to much weight on board.
What does it do?
Its believed to be an analogue computer that can predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. Its only the size of a shoe box and contains over 30 bronze gears in a wooden container powered by a hand crank.
The crank moves a series of gears that contain Greek zodiac signs and Egyptian calendar days, and predictions were made from aligning the device a certain way and cranking the handle the required distance.
The device actually has a set of partial instructions on a small bronze plate that talk about how the device works, but appears to require a good amount of knowledge about Greek astronomy as they don’t actually say directly what you’re supposed to do.
How was it made?
This is the main question concerning it, and not because of what it did as the Greeks are well known for their advancement in astronomy, but how it was built in the first place. Analogue computers like this weren’t replicated until 14th century Europe, and no other devices similar to the advanced nature of this one have ever been found.
Unfortunately no who has any idea as to who originally designed or made it, or used it for that matter, and most of all why there is only one of them.
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