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17th July 2024
01:01pm BST
The next time you scoff at pictures of your Dad sat at his Windows 95 PC back in the nineties, spare a thought for the people trying to log in to the oldest analog computer ever over 2000 years ago.
The Antikythera mechanism was discovered by sponge divers in the Greek Mediterranean in 1900 when they chanced upon a shipwreck full of treasures, and it left scientists and historians dumbfounded.
The Antikythera initially appeared to archaeologists as a heavy lump and was described as being about the size of a large dictionary.
That was until they opened it and found gear wheels the size of coins and several different components.
In fact, the original mass split into 82 fragments, leaving a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle for researchers to put back together.
The discovery flipped conceptions of ancient technology on it's head, and revealed a complexity that wasn't (up until that point) associated with the ancient civilisations.
The Antikythera mechanism is the most technologically complex ever found from the ancient world.
It is believed to date all the way back to between 205 and 60 BC.
Tony Freeth, a mathematician at University College London published a new analysis of the machine in 2021.
His team concluded that the device could be used to predict the positions of the sun, moon and planets on any specific day in the past or future.
The maker of the machine would have had to calibrate it with the known positions of these bodies.
A user could then simply turn a crank to the desired time frame to see astronomical predictions.
They found a “main drive wheel” inside the front of the device, which controls all the gearing.
This moves pointers and concentric rings which display the positions of different celestial bodies.
Small spheres showed the positions of the sun and moon and the phase of the moon. Coloured beads marked the locations of the planets along the ecliptic, the plane of the solar system.
At the back, two large dials were found along with some smaller ones.
The large top dial was a calendar that Freeth and his team believes represents the Metonic cycle, a 19-year period over which 235 moon phases recur.
The large lower dial was the 223-month saros dial, meaning it predicted the dates and solar and lunar eclipses.
Freeth believes more mechanisms like the Antikythera are still to be uncovered so we might not be at the end of the story.
