Antikythera Mechanism

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The Antikythera Mechanism is a dramatic example of Greek attempts to understand how things worked in the heavens. It is reported that Archimedes (one of the great scientists of the Greek civilization along with Aristotle and Euclid) constructed a mechanical device to trace out the motions of the sun and planets in the third century B. C. In 1901 divers working off the island of Antikythera found the remains of a clocklike mechanism 2,000 years old. 

It is now thought that the “Antikythera Mechanism” was a device perhaps similar to that of Archimedes (but probably not his, since the ship carrying it was wrecked in the first century B. C., two centuries after Archimedes).

Although the device was extensively damaged by its 2000 years at the bottom of the Mediterranean, a reconstruction has been put together (see left). It shows a facility with complex machinery as well as a strong interest in the astronomical problem of the motions of the planets.

The Greeks may have been on the verge of developing complex machinery and an industrial society based on it, although some have suggested that their heavy reliance on slaves made machinery economically impractical and would have forestalled its widespread use (e.g., W. Durant, “The Life of Greece”).

 

For more on the Antikythera Mechanism, see the June 1959 Scientific American,  (from  http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert/kythera/kythera3.htm)

 

For an animation that shows how it worked (caution: 45 MB requires high bandwidth) (from Educational Technology Lab, University of Macedonia,  http://etl.uom.gr/mr/Antikythera/anti.html)