When the Greek Minister of Education Spyridon Stais picked up a heavily corroded lump of bronze that had not yet been examined in detail at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens in May 1902, something unfortunate happened: a piece of the lump broke off. – revealed an astonishingly good example. Preserved gear with teeth only 1.5 millimeters high, as you would expect in a modern timepiece.
However, the chunk came from the wreck of a Roman ship that sank around 70 BC. It sank in 1900 in a bay on the island of Antikythera, off the southern tip of Greece, and was discovered by sponge divers. The wreck carried spoils of war from the eastern Aegean Sea and Asia Minor, marble and bronze statues, ceramic and glass ships, jewelry and coins from the period 70 to 62 BC. Allowed.
A precision gear from ancient times was a real shock to science. What the hell was that? British physicist and science historian Derek de Solla Price found the answer in the 1950s. “Price understood that the original device was flat and rectangular, the size of a modern table clock, and had a knob or crank on the side,” says London mathematician Tony Freeth.
And further: “A complex gear system inside the case moved a series of hands across circular dials on the front and back of the device. In this way the positions of the sun and moon could be displayed exactly. For any given day and sometimes at exactly the time of day.” Because names of celestial bodies are engraved on the mechanism, many researchers even speculate – even though no parts of such gears have been preserved – about position indications for the five planets known at the time: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
It has long been known in literature that the ancient Greeks built such gear trains. In the 1st century BC The polymath Poseidonius was working on the island of Rhodes in 200 BC, and the lawyer and later Roman consul Cicero saw a device that «cuius singulae conversions idem efficiunt in sole et in luna et in quinque stellis errantibus quod efficitur in caelo singulis diebus et noctibus» (“whose individual revolutions in the sun, the moon, and the five planets produce the same thing that takes place in the actual heaven in the individual days and nights”) as he did about 45 BC. BC in his work “De natura deorum” wrote. No one thought it possible that this description could be meant literally.
If you want to understand what a mechanical transmission does, first examine the gears: their position, their circumference, and especially the number of teeth. But even with the first X-rays of the mechanism, this was not easy. The photos were not particularly sharp and the gears themselves were only preserved in fragments. There was a wheel on it that the radiologists thought counted 128 teeth. 128 is a power of 2 and has no significance for astronomy.
Price, on the other hand, claimed that the wheel must have had 127 teeth. “127 is a prime number,” Freeth explains. “It refers to the orbit of the moon. If you observe the moon night after night, you will see that it moves across the starry sky once every 27.3 days throughout the zodiac. As early as the 5th century BC, the ancient Babylonians knew that the moon travels through the zodiac almost exactly 254 times in 19 years.” 254 is twice 127 – and with that Price had found this precise Babylonian lunar calendar, built into an ancient gear with more than 30 gears.
Today, after further extensive investigation of the total of 82 fragments found, including high-resolution, metal-penetrating computed tomograms, we know: the Antikythera Mechanism was a complex mechanical calendar made of bronze, a gear-driven analog computer, with scales and On the circuit boards were texts engraved with individual functions.
On one side was a solar calendar with date display. In one of the hands was a rotating, half-silvered ball that indicated the phase of the moon. The dial had a static display showing the 12 signs of the zodiac and a ring scale for the 365 days of the year as determined by the Egyptian calendar, with 12 months of 30 days plus five additional days. This scale was movable to take into account the extra leap day that occurred once every four years.
The other side of the device showed two more displays: at the top, a large spiral lunar calendar with the 19-year lunar cycle named after the Greek astronomer Meton. Below this was the spiral display of a large eclipse calendar to display solar and lunar eclipses. And finally, within the lunar calendar there was a small four-year representation of the Olympic calendar, showing the Panhellenic Games, including the changing location.
Ludwig Oechslin, technology and science historian and certified master watchmaker, was director of the International Watch Museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds. In 2006, a new analysis of the Antikythera mechanism appeared in the journal “Nature” Oechslin caught his attention and decided to recreate the device himself. Using a computer-controlled milling machine, he made the gears and assembled them into a replica of the age-old mechanism.
“We know from literature that such gear trains existed in ancient times,” says Oechslin, “but none have ever been found. According to the latest findings, one can now rightly say: the Antikythera mechanism is an analog calendar computer and therefore a model of the cosmos with enormous precision.
Source: Blick
I am Ross William, a passionate and experienced news writer with more than four years of experience in the writing industry. I have been working as an author for 24 Instant News Reporters covering the Trending section. With a keen eye for detail, I am able to find stories that capture people’s interest and help them stay informed.
