The UnXplained: Ancient Greek Computer Hidden In Shipwreck (Season 3) | History

The Aegean Sea, 1900. Just off the coast of the small Greek island of Antikythera, a group of Greek divers are hunting for sea sponges when they come across the remains of an ancient ship wreck. What they'd discovered was the wreck of a Roman-era trading ship, and soon it was apparent that there was a lot of archaeological stuff on board. And during the years 1900 to 1902, a major expedition was mounted from Greece to pull up everything they could find. There were statues. There were marbles, beautiful glassware. And it was clear from what else was on this ship that this was a ship that had gone down in the classical era. Dozens of priceless artifacts were salvaged from the wreckage, including one object that defied explanation. It was the remains of a coral-encrusted wooden and bronze box that, curiously, looked like a clock. They looked, and there were gear wheels inside this bronze. It was obvious from the rest of the stuff on the wreck that this was from the classical world, but the gear wheels were not known from the classical world. And it was then that they realized that this particular piece of bronze was something special. The artifact was sent to the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens. Archaeologists dated it to the second century BC, along with the other relics found in the wreck. But they were unable to determine what function the geared object served. For more than 50 years, its purpose remained a mystery. But in 1951, British physicist Derek John de Sola Price began a careful examination of the artifact and found something astonishing. The box contained the workings of a highly sophisticated device. By this point, the mechanism was in a bunch of different pieces. There are seven major fragments labeled A through G, and there are 75 other smaller fragments. Derek de Sola Price took a renewed interest in the mechanism, and he was able to put the major fragments into their correct position for the first time. The Antikythera mechanism, as it became known, is made predominantly of bronze. It would probably have been in a wooden case originally, possibly with bronze plates on the front and the back. It was about the size of a shoebox, essentially. There are two main display faces. There's the front face and the back face, and probably a handle on the side that you would have turned in order to make the thing work. On the front of the mechanism, there's something looking rather like a clock face would be the best way to describe it. In June 1959, Price published his findings in the journal Scientific American and described the Antikythera mechanism as being an ancient Greek computer. This was a spectacular device. It's an analog computer. It doesn't use digital. It uses wheels and gears. This was a device that we wouldn't see again for another 2,000 years until the 1800s. But if the Antikythera mechanism really was an ancient computer, then what was it designed to do? Well, in 2005, an international team of researchers known as the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project used cutting-edge scanning technology to obtain a detailed 3D image of the device's inner workings for the very first time. And the results were even more remarkable than anyone could have imagined. The X-ray tomography clearly laid out what the gear trains must have been. And also a complete reading of basically all the surviving inscriptions on the device, both inside and out. And those inscriptions are an instruction book on what the mechanism is and what it does. And it's clear from those inscriptions that it was intended that the mechanism should display the positions of the planets, as well as the sun and the moon. The Antikythera mechanism is an astronomical computing device that also visualized the revolutions and the time periods of the sun, the moon, and the five planets that were visible in antiquity, which are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. So via the gear work, it mimics the rotation of the sun and the moon and the planets. It displays many different things at a given time. Where the planets are in the sky, where the moon is in the sky, what phase the moon is, are there going to be any eclipses this month, and so on. We've done some computer calculations to work out how accurate the device would have been, taking into account the shape of the teeth, the slop in the gears, and so on. And the answer is it shows very accurately the sort of behavior of these things. The Greeks were thinking really deeply about the universe, how it worked, what it means to have a universe that's in some way mechanical, that is predictable.