The Antikythera mechanism
A geared bronze computer for predicting the sky, two thousand years too early.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 80 years
- Known to
- ± 30 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Recovered from a shipwreck in 1901 and only understood after X-ray tomography, the mechanism contains at least thirty precisely cut bronze gears including a differential-like arrangement, and models the motions of the Sun and Moon, the irregularity of the lunar orbit, eclipse cycles and probably the planets. Nothing of comparable mechanical complexity is known again until fourteenth-century astronomical clocks. It implies a lost tradition of Greek precision engineering.