The Amazing Antikythera Mechanism Quiz

In the fall of 1900, a crew of Greek sponge divers led by captain Dimitrios Kontos sought shelter from a severe storm near the remote island of Antikythera, in the Aegean Sea between the island of Kythira and Crete. To pass the time (and maybe find more sponges), they descended into the depths wearing heavy standard-issue canvas diving suits and brass helmets, facing extreme water pressure and the constant, lethal threat of the bends.

While exploring the seabed under these dangerous conditions, they stumbled upon a large ancient shipwreck resting about 45 meters (148 ft) underwater. The divers returned later in 1901 with the backing of the Greek government and the Hellenic Navy to conduct the world's first major underwater archaeological salvage operation. Among the marble statues and pottery hauled to the surface was a heavily corroded lump of bronze that was easily disregarded next to all the treasures. It would later be recognized as the Antikythera Mechanism.

For months after the sponge divers hauled up their treasures, many of the encrusted lumps of metal sat neglected and rotting in the open courtyard of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. There they slowly dried and cracked apart. An unnamed museum worker noticed a possible significance of a particular decaying lump and brought it to the attention of the museum director Valerios Stais.

Therefore, in May of 1902, Stais inspected the debris and noticed an embedded gear wheel with distinct square-cut teeth. Realizing the importance of his find, Stais instantly recognized that the calcified lump was not a random ship fixture or decoration, but an intricate, highly advanced mechanical device. This pivotal discovery shifted the artifact from a forgotten pile of marine junk into the spotlight, sparking over a century of scientific investigation.

In 1903, Ioannis Svoronos, the director of the Numismatic Museum in Athens, published a comprehensive catalog of the Antikythera shipwreck's treasures, released simultaneously in Greek and German editions. Embedded within this work was a dedicated section on the mechanism entitled "The Astrolabe of Antikythera". This was authored by Greek naval lieutenant and hydrography professor Periklis Rediadis. The catalog also featured the very first detailed photographic plates and descriptions of the four original fragments labeled A through D.

Svoronos's broader involvement with the artifacts included an ongoing, fiercely contested academic debate over the wreck's historical dating as his ideas clashed with ministry archaeologists who correctly placed it in the Hellenistic era. However, his 1903 monograph provided the foundational visual documentation that brought the mechanism to wider scholarly attention.

In 1958, Yale science historian Derek de Solla Price began his decades-long quest to unlock the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism, a lifelong obsession that would define the rest of his career. Joined by Greek nuclear physicist Charalambos Karakalos, Price made a monumental breakthrough in 1971 when Karakalos brought portable gamma-ray and X-ray equipment directly into the National Archaeological Museum in Athens to image the encrusted fragments.

Because the device was sealed beneath thick layers of marine corrosion, shooting radiation through the lumps acted like a medical X-ray, allowing them to peer inside for the very first time. In 1972, with the invaluable assistance of Karakalos's wife, Emily, who meticulously counted the tiny, hidden gear teeth on the resulting radiation films, they mapped the internal architecture. This revealed exact gear counts that provided the critical mathematical proof that the artifact was an astonishingly sophisticated, gear-driven astronomical computer of some type.

In 1976, legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau brought his famed research vessel, the "Calypso", to the Antikythera shipwreck site for a heavily publicized diving expedition. Utilizing modern scuba gear and suction equipment to clear away heavy layers of sediment and rock, Cousteau's team recovered additional bronze fragments, marble pieces, and crucially, a collection of ancient coins.

Coins are a huge help in dating sites. Once these had been cleaned and separated, they turned out to be from the city of Pergamon (in modern day Turkey), worth four drachmas each. One had an image of a basket of sacred snakes and had the initals of a magistrate who served there from 85 to 76 BC. This placed the wreckage's final voyage in the first half of the 1st century BCE (roughly 70 to 60 BCE). Archaeologists now gained a vital chronological aspect to help narrow down when the cargo ship sank and contextualize the era in which the mechanism was created.

Beginning in 1989, computer scientist Allan Bromley (with the aid of mechanical engineer Michael Wright) launched a rigorous reinvestigation of the Antikythera Mechanism at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. To peer through the heavy, obscuring layers of marine mineralization without damaging the fragile artifacts, they pioneered the use of linear x-ray tomography. This is a specialized imaging technique that creates detailed pictures of a narrow focal plane inside an object.

By capturing sequential cross-sectional exposures of the bronze fragments, Bromley was able to visualize the internal gear teeth and gear train arrangements with unprecedented clarity. This groundbreaking analysis revealed significant flaws in Derek de Solla Price's earlier model, fundamentally shifting the scientific understanding of the device's internal architecture and laying the essential groundwork for future mechanical reconstructions.

In 2002, mechanical engineer and Science Museum in London curator Michael T. Wright achieved a huge milestone. He published and unveiled the world's first fully working brass reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism. His pioneering physical model successfully demonstrated how the ancient Greek device could have operated as a comprehensive geocentric planetarium.

By translating complex ancient epicyclic mathematical theories into physical gear trains and pin-and-slot mechanisms, Wright proved how the device mechanically automated the non-uniform orbital speeds and retrograde loops of the Sun, Moon, and all five classical planets known to the ancient Greeks (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

In 2005, a major turning point in the study of the Antikythera Mechanism arrived when the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project teamed up with tech giant Hewlett-Packard and industrial imaging firm X-Tek Systems. This was driven by instrumental contributions from HP's Tom Malzbender and X-Tek's Roger Hadland. To capture faint, invisible surface inscriptions, Malzbender and the HP team utilized Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM). This meant employing a dome-shaped apparatus embedded with multiple light sources to photograph the fragments from every angle under shifting illumination.

Meanwhile, Hadland and X-Tek engineered a custom, powerful 450kV micro-focus X-ray computed tomography machine (nicknamed "Bladerunner") specifically tailored to penetrate the dense, corroded bronze chunks. This unique X-Tek contraption virtually sliced open the artifacts in 3D, exposing hidden internal gears and making hundreds of previously illegible Greek characters readable for the first time.

Following the high-resolution micro-CT scans, classicist and epigrapher Alexander Jones played a pivotal role in decoding the thousands of tiny, highly weathered Greek characters hidden across the mechanism's fragments. Working alongside the research team, Jones meticulously translated and interpreted these ancient texts, which were published in landmark studies starting in 2008 ("Nature" journal) and expanded upon in subsequent years.

His epigraphic decoding revealed that the inscriptions functioned as an astronomical instruction manual and calendar guide, detailing solar and lunar cycles, eclipse predictions, and even the names of ancient athletic festivals like the Olympics. This discovery helped transform the understanding of how the device was used to experience and track the ancient cosmos.

Known online as Clickspring, horologist and artisan Chris (he prefers to use only his first name) created a highly acclaimed YouTube series dedicated to the experimental archaeology of the Antikythera Mechanism. Rather than relying on modern computer-controlled manufacturing, he set out to build a fully functional replica of the ancient device using only tools, alloys, and techniques available to ancient Greek craftspeople. He even hand-forged his own specialized files and workshop equipment along the way.

His videos are celebrated for their incredible attention to detail, quality craftsmanship, and deep dives into ancient metallurgy and gear cutting. The series kicked off in 2017 with his first video on the project, titled "The Antikythera Mechanism Episode 1 - Greeks, Clocks and Rockets", which laid out the ambitious roadmap for reconstructing the world's oldest known analog computer from scratch.