Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Antikythera Mechanism

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Subscribe to the podcast!  https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ In the year 1900, a crew of Greek sponge divers was looking for sponges off the coast of the island of Antikythera. While they were searching, they found the remains of an ancient shipwreck. The wreck contained over 30 marble statues, pieces of glasswork, one corroded metal object that no one could identify. 75 years later, using new technology, they discovered what that hunk of metal was designed for. Learn more about the Antikythera Mechanism and how it forever changed our views of the ancient world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. -------------------------------- Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EEDailyPodcast/ Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the year 1900, a crew of sponge divers was looking for sponges off of the coast of the Greek island of Antikythra. While they were searching, they found the remains of an ancient shipwreck. The wreck contained over 30 marble statues, some pieces of glasswork, some coins, and a corroded metal object that nobody could identify. 75 years later, using new technology, they discovered what the hunk of metal was designed for. Learn more about the Antikythra mechanism and how it forever changed our view of the ancient world on this episode of Everything Everyting wear daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy

bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. As with most archaeological discoveries, the Antichythro wreck was totally discovered by accident. It was the year 1900 and a Greek ship that was heading to hunt for

in North Africa, took shelter near the island of Antikythra during a storm. Antikythra is located between the island of Crete and mainland Greece. And in Greek, it simply means the opposite of Kithra, which is the name of the larger island nearby. Antikythra has always been a pretty small island. During the Ottoman period, they never even bothered to conquer it because it was so small it wasn't deemed to be worth their time. While the Greek sponge divers were there, they decided to dive down to see if they

could find any sponges. One of the divers, Elias Stadiatis, went down at one site that was 45 meters deep or about 150 feet. They were diving with those old-timey diving helmets and canvas suits that were attached to an air hose at the surface. As soon as he got down to the bottom, he signaled back to the men on the boat that he needed the surface. When he got to the surface, he was terrified. He spoke of seeing piles of corpses and horses littering the seafloor. To be fair, there isn't a whole lot of light at 150 feet below the surface. and he was wearing a diving helmet.

And he also wasn't totally wrong. He did see bodies and horses. It's just that they happened to be statues. What they had found was the wreck of a Roman-era ship that had sunk just off the coast of Antikythra. The shipwreck, known as the Antikythra wreck, was a literal treasure trove. Over the next several years,

divers returned to the site, beginning to salvage everything that could find at the bottom of the sea. The next year, in 1901, they found a bronze sculpture called the Youth of Antikythra. They found an additional 30 marble sculptures. In addition to the sculptures, they found glasswork, three sculptures of horse, a liar made of

bronze, assorted pottery, coins, jewels, and a collection of lead pipes. One theory holds that the ship was carrying items to be used in a triumph for Julius Caesar. Another theory is that it was returning booty for the Roman General Sulla who had sacked Athens. But there's probably no way to ever know the truth.

The thing is, there was something else that was found, and no one was really sure what it was. It basically looked like a lump of corroded metal that maybe was attached to some wood. All of the artifacts salvaged from the wreck were sent to the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens, where they were placed in storage for later analysis. The statues got most of the attention, and the recovered lump of metal was mostly ignored. However, a year later, one of the archaeologists took a closer look at the object and noticed something odd.

It appears that embedded in that lump was a metal gear. Despite that very interesting and very odd observation, the metal clump was once again ignored, this time for decades. Over time, the fragile object broke into many pieces, 82 of them to be precise. Most of them are pretty small, but there was still one major piece that was intact. Interest in the object surfaced again in 1951 when a Yale University physicist named Derek D'Sola Price concluded that the device was for predicting astronomical events. He said it was an ancient analog computer. The real breakthrough occurred in 1971. Price and a Greek nuclear physicist named Charlampos Caracolos subjected the object to a series of tests using x-rays and gamma-ray scanning.

What they found was a whole bunch of gears that were inside. Masterfully created bronze gears that all seemed to fit together. While much of the original device was missing, there appeared to have been approximately 30 gears. The problem was, this didn't make any sense. Based on everything we knew about the Greeks, they didn't have this sort of technology. Metallic gears like this weren't supposed to be invented for several more centuries. This was the type of stuff you would normally see in a mechanical clock, and as far as we knew, there weren't any mechanical clocks in the ancient world.

Now dubbed the Antikythra mechanism, it became an object of fascination for many people around the world. Jacques Cousteau went to dive the wreck site in 1976 and found a few small bronze pieces, which might have been a part of the original mechanism. Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman visited the National Museum in Athens and found it all rather boring, except for the Antikythro mechanism. About it, he said it was, quote, so entirely different and strange that it is nearly impossible. It's some kind of machine with gear trains, very much like the inside of a modern wind-up alarm clock, end quote.

There was still a great deal of debate as to what the purpose of the device was. In 2006, another analysis of the mechanism discovered something else. there was writing on it in the most common form of ancient Greek. It appeared to have been an instruction manual for the device, which references dials and functions. The text is incomplete, but what characters are on it supports this interpretation. In 2016, yet more inscriptions were found, which referenced 462-year and 442-year periods,

which were the same as the Greek synodic periods for Venus and Saturn, and this was based on their geocentric view of the world. Over time, the consensus converged on what the obvious purpose of the device was. It was an astronomical calculator. Based on the pieces we have and the characters found on the device, people have been able to largely reconstruct the mechanism and how it might have worked. The device was a rectangle, about the size of a large dictionary or a mantle clock. There were dials on both sides of the device.

On one side were pointers like the hands of a clock that moved around and showed the location of the sun, moon, phase-es, of the moon and the known planets. On the other side were two dials. One dial calculated the metonic cycle. The metonic cycle is the 19-year cycle that phases of the moon go through. It covers 235 moon cycles, which takes you to a point where the phases are back in the same time of year. And the cycle is only an hour and a half off of a perfect 19 years.

The second dial indicates the Saros cycle. The Saros cycle is a 223-month-long cycle. that calculates solar and lunar eclipses, and it is about 18 and a half years long. There may have been as many of 42 different astronomical events that were tracked by the device. The entire device was operated by a crank on the side, which you turn to run everything backwards or forwards in time. In addition to virtual versions of the Antikythro mechanism, there have been several actual versions built by enthusiasts. They differ slightly because there are parts missing, but they're able to achieve basically the same thing, using the knowledge of the gears that we have.

Knowing what the Antikythera mechanism does, however, seems to raise more questions than it answers. And the big one is, why have we never found anything like this before? There were some ancient authors, which made allusions to devices that might have acted like a planetarium. Archimedes supposedly created a device called an Ornery,

which was spheres of the known planets, the moon and the sun, which rotated about the earth. And he also supposedly wrote a text on how to make these devices that's been lost, to history. It's also unknown for who this device might have been made for. It isn't known if it was designed for a scholar, an astrologer, or if it was just designed as a plaything for someone rich to show off at parties. To date, we haven't found anything else from this period that is close to the antichythera mechanism. It's the only ancient device from Greece that we found that uses gears.

However, now that we know at least one of them exists, it's something that other people might be on the look for in future archaeological digs. Maybe we can even find. one that wasn't corroded at the bottom of the sea for 2,000 years. But perhaps the even bigger question is, why didn't the ancient Greeks or anyone else follow up on this technology? Back in my episode about the bicycle, I asked the question, why didn't anyone invent the bicycle sooner? The question about the Antikythera mechanism is, why didn't anybody follow up on this? This question vexed the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark. He read the theories of Price from 1959 and went to see the device himself in

He said, quote, looking at this extraordinary relic is a most disturbing experience. Few activities are more futile than what-if type of speculation, yet the Antikyther mechanism positively compels such thinking. Though it is over 2,000 years old, it represents a level of achievement which our technology did not reach until the 18th century. If the insight of the Greeks had matched their ingenuity, the Industrial Revolution might have begun a thousand years before Columbus. By this time, we would not be merely pottering around on the moon, we would have reached the nearest stars. End quote. We will probably never know the answer to those questions. Whoever built the Antikythra mechanism had the ability to create an actual working mechanical

clock if they had only put a spring or a gravity device on it to turn it. As it stands, the anti-Kithromachinism is perhaps the most out-of-place object that's ever been discovered. It would almost be like discovering a television set that dates back to the Renaissance. With this single device, we have been forced to reassess our knowledge and technical assessment of the entire ancient world. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Steve over at Podcast Republic. They write,

Really? You have Bill Buckner playing for the Cubs? Sloppy, otherwise love the podcast. Okay. I need to make two corrections regarding the previous episode on sports curses. First, Buckner did play for the Chicago Cubs at one point, and I would say he played there during his best years. But I do recognize he was playing for the Red Sox, not the Cubs, when the ball went through his legs. In my mind, back from my prime years collecting baseball cards, I still think of Bill Buckner as a Cub because that's where he won his only batting title in 1980. Because I was talking about the Cubs and the Red Sox in the episode, I got them mixed up.

And besides, in 1986, the Cubs couldn't have been in the World Series, because the Mets won the World Series and they're in the National League. The general point I was trying to make still remains, as the Red Sox were also cursed, and it turns out Bill Buckner was wearing a Chicago Cubs batting glove when the error occurred on his glove hand. But yes, he was a member of the Red Sox at that time. And I hope everyone recognizes the irony in me making an error about making an error. The second correction has to do with the person on top of the Philadelphia City Hall. I said William Pitt, and the statue is a bit.

actually of William Penn. William Penn is the namesake of Pennsylvania. William Pitt is the namesake of Pittsburgh. I must have just zoned out on this one as I typed a four-letter surname beginning with the letter P that had a double consonant at the end. Remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you two can have it read on the show.