My Antikythera Mechanism illustrations
This set - and ohers - were commissioned by Scientific American for an article about this incredible device discovered in a shipwreck off Point Glyphadia on the Greek island of Antikythera. The wreck had been found in October 1900 by a group of Greek sponge divers. They retrieved numerous artifacts, including bronze and marble statues, pottery, glassware, jewelry, coins, and the mechanism itself, which were transferred to the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens for storage and analysis.
The mechanism itself went unnoticed for 2 years: it was a lump of corroded bronze and wood and the museum staff had many other pieces with which to busy themselves. On 17 May 1902, archaeologist Valerios Stais was examining the finds and noticed that one of the pieces of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Stais initially believed it was an astronomical clock, but most scholars considered the device to be prochronistic, too complex to have been constructed during the same period as the other pieces that had been discovered. Investigations into the object were soon dropped until Derek J. de Solla Price became interested in it in 1951.
This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop. Whoever has done this has done it extremely carefully ... in terms of historic and scarcity value, this mechanism is regarded by many as more valuable than the Mona Lisa.
This mechanism has the oldest known complex gear mechanism and is sometimes called the first known analog computer, although the quality of its manufacture suggests that it may have had undiscovered predecessors during the Hellenistic Period. It appears to be constructed upon theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers and is estimated to have been made around 100 BC. In 1974, British science historian and Yale University Professor Derek de Solla Price concluded from gear settings and inscriptions on the mechanism's faces that the mechanism was made about 87 BC and was lost only a few years later. All of the mechanism's instructions are written in Koine Greek,[9][not in citation given] and the consensus among scholars is that the mechanism was made in the Greek-speaking world.
