The Antikythera Mechanism (published on 8 Jul 2022)
It is probably an extraterrestrial device. It is clearly a machine from the future left in the past by a time traveller. These are some of the theories circulating in online forums about the Antikythera mechanism. It is an artefact from the 1st century BC, found on the seabed by sponge divers, capable of making countless predictions, such as the position of the heavenly bodies or the dates of the Panhellenic Games. Let us discover its history, as well as the various attempts to reproduce it and pay tribute to it, such as the one made by Hublot.
A CLOCK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
Bath sponges can be synthetic, but there are also natural sponges, which are in fact animals. These sponges are collected by specialised divers.
In 1900, Captain Dimitrios Kondos and his crew of sponge divers sailed the Aegean Sea in search of fishing grounds off North Africa. While waiting for favourable winds, they dropped anchor off the Greek island of Antikythera. Since they were stopped there anyway, they decided to dive in their special canvas suits with copper helmets. The diver Elias Stadiatis went down to a depth of 45 metres but quickly tugged on the rope to signal that he needed to be pulled up. At the time, the gas mixture used for breathing underwater included nitrogen, a toxic element capable of causing hallucinations. When Elias reached the surface, his colleagues thought the story he was telling owed more to the nitrogen than to reality itself. According to his description, he had just seen the corpses of people and horses spread over a wide area of the seabed. Even so, Captain Kondos put on his diving suit and went to confirm what was really down there. Shortly afterwards, he came back with the arm of a bronze statue. This was 1900, archaeology was not yet considered that important and Captain Kondos's crew had to work, so they left the wreck and went off to gather sponges. On the way back they decided to make a few more dives. They then recovered several artefacts, which they later showed to the authorities in Athens. Faced with this incredible discovery, several ships of the Hellenic Navy were immediately sent to the site. Together with the Greek Ministry of Education and the Royal Hellenic Navy, the sponge divers took part in the salvage of one of the greatest underwater treasures in history. By mid-1901, bronze statues had been recovered, along with thirty-six marble sculptures, including Hercules, Ulysses, Diomedes, Hermes and Apollo, three marble statues of horses, a bronze lyre and several pieces of glass. Many other small, everyday artefacts were also found, and the whole assemblage was taken to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. However, the death of the diver Giorgos Kritikos and the paralysis of two others due to decompression problems brought work at the site to an end in the summer of 1901.
THE FIRST MECHANICAL CLOCK (OR PERHAPS AN ASTROLABE)
On 17 May 1902, the archaeologist Valerios Stais made the most famous discovery of all while studying the artefacts at the National Archaeological Museum. He noticed that a severely corroded piece of bronze had a gear wheel embedded in it and legible inscriptions in Greek. The object would come to be known as the Antikythera Mechanism. It was originally thought to be one of the earliest forms of a mechanical clock, or perhaps an astrolabe. It is sometimes described as the oldest analogue computer in the world.
JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU
The wreck remained untouched until 1953, when the French naval officer and explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau visited it with the aim of redefining the site. Cousteau arrived with a full team in the summer and, in the autumn of 1976, at the invitation of the Greek government and under the direction of the archaeologist Dr Lazaros Kolonas, the team recovered almost 300 artefacts, including ceramic jars, bronze and silver coins, pieces of bronze and marble sculptures, bronze statuettes, several pieces of gold jewellery and even human remains of the crew and passengers. Remains of hull planks showed that the ship was made of elm, a wood frequently used by the Romans for their ships.
THE DATE
In 1964, a sample of a hull plank was carbon-dated, giving a date of 220 BC ± 43 years. Further evidence for a shipwreck date in the early 1st century BC emerged in 1974, when Yale University professor Derek de Solla Price published his interpretation of the Antikythera mechanism. He argued that the object was a “calendar computer” and, from the gear configurations and the inscriptions on the faces of the mechanism, concluded that it was made around 87 BC and lost only a few years later.
THE MECHANISM
The original mechanism is on display in the bronze collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. “This is unlikely to be the only example,” says Martin Allen, basing his view on the fact that in the entire mechanism there is not a single error, unnecessary hole or misplaced cut. Allen suggests that, because the mechanism is made of bronze, a valuable metal, many earlier mechanisms may have been melted down and reused. Some authors suggest that it may have been a development of the planetarium built by Archimedes, who lived between 287 BC and 212 BC. The Antikythera Mechanism consists of 27 gears, all made of bronze. Its purpose would have been to show the orbits of various heavenly bodies. Because fragments of wood were found in the mechanism, it is believed to have been protected by a wooden case. In other words, it is a device made up of bronze gear wheels in a wooden case, and it is thought to have had a large circular dial with hands.
In the 1st century BC, Cicero mentions a device “recently built by Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same movements of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets”. Devices like these are mentioned several times in that period. The largest wheel is 1450 mm in diameter and has 223 teeth. The scientist Allan George Bromley and the clockmaker Frank Percival created the first reproduction of the mechanism. Others have been made since.
There is even a craftsman on Instagram who makes reproductions to order: @antikythera_man.
HOW IT WORKED
A lever on the side would turn the mechanism in both directions. The internal gear trains moved at least seven hands at different speeds, indicating the date of appearance of the Sun, the Moon and each of the five planets visible to the naked eye – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
Also on the front there were two scales, one showing the signs of the zodiac and the other a 365-day calendar consistent with the Egyptian solar calendar. On the back there would have been two dials, each with one hand and a spiral scale. One of them showed the Metonic cycle, which indicated the cycles of the Moon and the Sun over a period of 19 years. The second dial indicated the dates of lunar and solar eclipses.
THE ORIGIN
Some historians explain that Greek knowledge of this kind of mechanical construction was strongly influenced by the Arabs. Erich von Däniken, for his part, claims that the device naturally came from an extraterrestrial spaceship. Historians disagree. Some theories point to the hypothesis that it was built by the philosopher Posidonius, who had a workshop in Rhodes. According to Cicero, Posidonius made a similar model in the 1st century BC. The tradition of making such mechanisms may even be much older. Cicero wrote about a bronze device made by Archimedes in the 3rd century BC. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, thinks that the eclipse cycle represented is of Babylonian origin and begins in 205 BC. Perhaps the author was Hipparchus, an astronomer from Rhodes at the time, who worked out the mathematical calculations that made the construction of the device possible. Hipparchus is known for having connected the predictions based on Babylonian arithmetic with the geometric theories favoured by the Greeks. Regardless of its specific origin, the Antikythera mechanism proves that the ancient Greeks used complex arrangements of precisely cut wheels to represent the very latest in scientific knowledge. It is also a good way of understanding how they saw the universe. They believed that nature worked according to predefined rules, like a machine – an approach that forms the basis of our modern scientific views.
1400 YEARS LATER: THE FIRST GEARED MECHANISMS
The need to know the time arose in Europe around the end of the 13th century, and it was only from that period onwards that the mechanics of gears and toothed wheels slowly began to develop. At first, clocks had no hands; they were found only in the most important cathedrals, and they were very large and very imprecise pieces.
The first clocks with hands showed only the hours: the lack of precision, and the fact that the customs of the time did not require it, meant there was no reason for divisions of time smaller than the hour. Between 1348 and 1364, Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio built a device capable of displaying the position of the Sun, the Moon and the 5 visible planets. This machine had 107 gear wheels and stood about one metre tall. Above all, what sets it apart from the Antikythera mechanism, besides the roughly 1400 years between them, is the fact that it had a balance and a weight, which allowed it to run autonomously.
HUBLOT MASTER PIECES AND THE TRIBUTE TO THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM
Some models from Hublot's Master Pieces collection
As a tribute to human art and ingenuity, Hublot created the Master Pieces series, unveiled for the first time in January 2011 with the introduction of the MP-01. Hublot's fourth masterpiece, the MP-04 (904.NX.4101.RX), is a tribute to the Antikythera Mechanism. At the request of Jean-Claude Biver and under the direction of Mathias Buttet, Hublot managed to reduce a mechanism 1 m tall and 20 cm thick to one measuring 49.90 mm x 49.05 mm x 20.83 mm at first, and later to one of 35.2 mm x 37 mm x 12.43 mm, which can be worn on the wrist. The initial version, the MP-04, was made in only 4 pieces and was never sold. One is on display at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, the second officially entered the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Athens, and the third was put up for auction to raise funds for the museum to conserve the Antikythera Mechanism. Finally, the fourth and last will be kept by Hublot in its museum as a memento of this great adventure. In 2013 a less complicated version was launched, the MP-08 Antikythera SunMoon.
MP-08 ANTIKYTHERA SUNMOON
This tribute to the Antikythera Mechanism includes a solar calendar and a lunar calendar, as well as an indication of the sidereal position of the Sun and the Moon. This means that, besides reading the time, the wearer of this watch can check, for a given day and with extreme precision, the phase of the Moon or, more specifically, its shape in the sky, the name of the constellation behind it and the time the Moon takes to pass through that constellation. For the same day, it also shows the constellation located behind the Sun and the time the Sun takes to pass through it. The piece is completed by a flying tourbillon. 20 units were sold in 2013. The MP-08 gave this Hublot tribute the prominence it deserved, since the launch of the MP-04 had been overshadowed by the flamboyant MP-05 LaFerrari that followed immediately afterwards.
Notes:
Video about the Antikythera Mechanism
Recommended book - A Portable Cosmos
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