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

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

In the year 1900, a crew of sponge divers was looking for sponges off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera. While they were searching, they found the remains of an ancient shipwreck. The wreck contained over 30 marble statues, pieces of glasswork, and 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. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. 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. It how it forever changed our view of the ancient world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. As with most archaeological discoveries, the Antikythra wreck was totally discovered by accident. It was the year 1900, and a Greek ship that was heading to hunt for sponges 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 they 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 lyre 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 were 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 DeSola 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. world. Now dubbed the Antikythera mechanism, it became an object of fascination for many people around the world. Ja 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 Antikythera 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, phases 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 been able to do? 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 Orrory,

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 Antikythro 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 1965. 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 Antikythera 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 the those questions. Whoever built the Antichythra 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 antichythera mechanism 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. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise. Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.