How the Antikythera Mechanism Works

It's one of my favorite things actually too, although I didn't list that when I was asked what my favorite things were in that one listener mail, and still it's up there. Um, but you too, huh oh yeah, starting with uh, well, starting with Indiana Jones. Yeah, that definitely helps that that we were alive and at the right age when those came out. Um, well, Chuck, there's a ship.

It's an unnamed ship as far as I know, that went down in the g and c off the coast of a tiny, teeny little spit of land called Anti Cathera in Greece, in between Crete and the Greek mainland, I believe, and um in nineteen o one or nine hundred it was discovered and it actually ended up giving birth to the field of um marine archaeology. Actually it was the first shipwreck that was ever excavated archaeologically. Yeah, I think I wrote an article on that way back

in the day. Underwater archaeology. It's a very tricky, I would imagine, so because most of the stuff you find is falling apart, Like the second you take it out of water, it starts falling apart. Right, So they've gotten really good now and imagine they were not as good about it in nineteen hundreds about bringing stuff up still in water, yeah, and transporting in water, same sea water, display it in water to uh well know then they start poking around in yeah, right water. Yeah, with the water.

It's pretty sensible. Um I could have come up with that, I think with that method. Yeah, good for you. Um well, So okay, anyway, this shipwreck that was discovered in discovered actually by accident, right. Yeah. There was some sponge divers. You know, sponge diving. It's a big deal. Apparently it wasn't Greece. It was. That's where you had to get

sponges back in the day. Uh is in the ocean, and they were the sponge divers who they actually got blown off course by a bad storm and ended up in that lovely part of town, and they said, boy, this is great, let's just dive here. One guy dove down, came back up and there. They weren't free diving at this point, and actually had you can listen to her well, it wasn't a diving bell, but underwater breathing apparatus is. At this point. He came back and he's like, oh

my god, they're dead horses and dead men everywhere. Yeah, and the boss is like, I don't know about that. Let me go dive down there. He dives down and comes up with a bronze hand and says, you big dummy. They smacked the guy over the head with it. It's a statue, a bunch of statues down there decomposing. And then he went, wait, why are there a bunch of

statues down there? And they they said, well, let's figure out, let's remember where the spot is and we'll just head off to North Africa and do our sponge diving like we were going to initially. Yeah, they still have to make some dough, right, But when they came back, they took the bronze arm and the location of the ship to the Greek government. And the Greek government said, you know what, this could be a big deal. We have a lot of antiquities out there under the sea and

this might be some sort of treasure troups. So they hired these sponge divers to go back and excavate this place, and they found some pretty amazing stuff. In addition to the bronze arm, they found all sorts of marble statues. Um. They found a bronze statue of a young athlete. I think it was like six ft tall, a little bigger than life is what they call it. Um they found a bust of a cynic, a philosopher, a very detailed lifelike bust that's really neat. And um that was the

guy whose arm. That was his arm, Oh, it was his arm. Okay. Um. And they found all manner of stuff, some really cool stuff and brought it up and they displayed it in the museum. And among this trove, um there was a greatly overlooked item item number one five

zero eight seven. And um, it was this weird kind of it looked almost like a kind of a clock face in a wooden frame and no one knew what it was, and compared to the amazing art that had been brought up, it looked like a pile of garbage basically, So they just piled it away um and it languished for a while until it was um kind of rediscovered again. Yeah, and giving credit where credit is due. The Sponge Team captain, I think that's what they called themselves. He was captain, Yeah,

Sponge Team Captain, Demetrius Kantos. And then the cry baby who dove down there and thought he saw dead people was Elias Stadiatus. And if there's one thing I love, it's Greek names. Love the names. Do you like those as much as archaeology? Greek archaeologists that you're pretty much

flying in the upper atmosphere for me. Uh So those were the dudes that led the Sponge team, and all those antiquities, they're scattered about a little bit, but most of them are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. Uh and also some in Switzerland, oddly enough, and then some more in a different museum of underwater antiquity in Greece. And the reason the Greeks went to this trouble and didn't just say whatever. Who cares about a bronze arm.

Apparently they'd been defeated recently by the Ottoman Turks within the last few years, and we're looking for a way to restore some national pride. And what better way to restore national pride than raising two thousand year old statues of your you know, ancient gods that were made by your predecessors. And not only statues, but um, lamps and bowls and utensils and tools and just all sorts of stuff. It was a treasure trove. Yeah. So, um, this this

site still is basically intact. Um. It's a it's the shipwreck is over Um a couple of I think about three d foot span, about the length of a football field. And there's actually for a long time they thought it was two ships, but they think actually no, it was an enormous, massive ship that broke into two and is um they've only just found the front. They found like

the cabin, they haven't even found the hold. And that it was a huge grain ship that had been converted to basically a treasure ship that was taking Greek antiquities to Rome around sixty b c. E um. And it's sunk. So they there's all these treasures that they haven't even found yet. They dove on it in nineteen hundred and one, Jacques Cousteau hit it up in nineteen fifty and then again in nineteen and now there's the most sophisticated dives that are being taken on it. Yes, he's on it UM.

As of two thousand and fourteen, there's an international team that includes some people from Woods Hole Geographic Institute or Oceanographic Institute UM who are really starting to figure this out. Yeah, and you know, one of the reasons you're still doing this is because, like you said, it's just a great find no matter what. But the other reason is because item number one zero eight seven a k A. The

h how's that pronounced again? Annikathera anacathera mechanism is UM one of the most mysterious finds ever because nobody knows who made it. Uh and until recently no one knew exactly what it was. But now they pretty much figured it out. Yeah. Well, so when they when they first brought it up in N one UM again, it just looked like some weird kind of kind of like a clock, but it was in a wooden frame as the wooden frame was exposed to the air, it's it split and

the stuff inside fell apart. And when it fell apart, one of the directors of the museum, I believe spirit On Stais another great name. Um, he looked inside and realized that these are all like actually different bronze parts, and they have inscriptions and they appear to be geared

teeth like precision gears. Right, Except that's impossible because that technology didn't come along for well over a thousand years later, yes, a thousand plus, like maybe fourteen hundred, two thousand years later, right, So it pops up in the west about the fourteenth century in Europe. So yeah, like you say, it's totally impossible that this could be what what he's looking at,

not fifty or a hundred years. So some people said, Um, this thing probably accidentally was dropped over this wreck site and just happened to nestle in and make it seem like it was part of this ancient shipwreck. Nope, No, it was found underneath other debris in the shipwreck. So that's virtually impossible. But it was so confounding, and it's so completely undermined our understanding at the time of technology like that and just the understanding of that kind of

precision engineering. Um that it was just set aside, like no one knows what this says. Let's just pretend it doesn't exist. Yeah. Uh, and that happened until about the nineteen fifties. And uh, we'll take a little break here and we'll get back to what happened in the nineteen fifties right after this. Alright, so it's nineteen fifties. Everyone's drunk at lunch, smoking cigarette, throwing trash out of their window, right, and there's an impossible machine rotting away in a museum

in Greece, that's right. And that's when a man named Derek Dislo Price. Uh so, you know what, this thing is pretty neat and I think I'm gonna make this my new obsession. So he spent years researching this thing and basically said, I think it's some sort of weird Uh he said computer. He meant, well, he didn't mean computer, because it can't be a computer. Obviously it's not programmable now, so it can't be a computer. But it's I mean that words not terribly far off off. Yeah, it's not

a computer. So he's using the wrong word there. But along with Dr c uh Man another great Greek name Kara Kallos, he's a radiographer. He said, let's take some X rays of this thing. In the nineteen seventy four he published as Findings in Gears from the Greeks, which he thought was gonna light the world on fire. But it turns out people were a little scared, uh to say, Yeah, this thing is predates these kind of precision gears by well over a thousand years, So let's rethink everything we

know about this kind of technology. Everyone, No one wanted to touch it with the tin footpole, is what I gathered. It was kind of ignored the at the time. The people who were studying ancient Greece were studying their written documents, right, they weren't studying like artifacts, like physical relics or anything like that, and they certainly weren't really up on the

ancient Greek technology technology. Um. And so yeah, he wrote this this book and just expected it to change the world because he really had approached it from a very scientific standpoint. When they finally released his book in the seventies, right, his theory on what it was was correct. Yeah, he theorized that It was a I'm going to use the

word computer alright, a mechanism. It was a mechanism with UM at one point up to seventy two different precise gears, two gears that all interacted with one another to track the movement of the celestial bodies, the five planets that were visible to the naked eye, the Sun, the Moon, It tracked eclipses solar and lunar um. And it also um it tracked the Olympic Games just as an added bonus. Well, if you're gonna have a astronomical calculator, you might as

well throw in a sports calendar. Yeah, you know, might as well. Uh, and so the whole thing again, this thing should not have existed, like it wasn't for another four years before anything like this appeared in the West. Um. So it shouldn't have been which was another reason why a lot of people weren't like, yes, this is a great book Gears from the Greeks. It changed everything. They were like, you're totally full of it. And this poor guy, Um Price was not helped at all by a guy

named Eric van Danikin right. Yeah, he wrote a book in uh nineteen sixty eight called Chariots of the Gods, and in that he proposed that, um, there are aliens who have been bringing us technological gifts to Earth and this is one of them. And everyone this was a really popular book, so he got all the headlines with just a completely fabricated story. Yeah, it was like it was the birth of the interest in ufology and the Bermuda Triangle. The Naski lines are um landing strips, that

kind of stuff. Right, So when this guy came along and put his stamp of um nuttiness, I guess if certainly interesting. That whole Time Life Mysteries series definitely came out of this von Dannikin's work kind of thing, but it had nothing to do with any kind of academy or scholarliness, right, so he really helped put the kai bosh on Price's work. This gears from the Greeks, and it languished for a while, um for another couple of decades,

I believe, right, Yeah, that's right. It wasn't until the mid two thousand's that they decided, you know what, we had this great technology now called CT scanning, computed UH tomography, and what we can do with this stuff? We can actually get inside this thing. And there are videos of this actually being done on the mechanism. It's really cool looking. You can like watch it unfold in real time. And they basedly figured out from the inside out how this

thing worked and how it operated. And it is as follows. There's a picture like a a wooden box about the size of a shoe box. Right, Yeah, it looks bigger to me, but I guess um I saw someone else to describe it like a thick laptop size. Okay, again with the computers, people just can't stop. It's the computer, an ancient computer. On one side of the box, if

if it's standing like a shoe box on end. On one side, there's a crank like just a small dial with a little handle they would used to crank this thing up. The handles missing. Now, by the way, this is what you're describing is what it looked like originally. Right. Oh yeah, Now it's just disintegrated blobs and chunks of things. Yeah. So the knob on the side is what wound it forward and backward. And uh, then you had a big front side and a backside. All the gears are in

the middle contained their end. Yes, and again these are gears with teeth between fifteen and twenty three of them on a gear, and all of them. The number of teeth that they have has to do with their relationship to the other gears they interact with, that's right. So they have all these different hands. If you wound it up,

it would engage these gears. Uh. Each of the hands moves at a separate pace and represents what you said earlier, the five planets and Earth in the moon basically Sun and Sun and moon basically anything we can see from Earth at this point, right, And these are the gears inside, and the gears are physically representing how the say, the

Sun and the Moon interact. Well, now these are the hands, right, but then they're driving the hands, and the hands have a representation in the form of a colored orb on the face of the actual mechanism the machine exactly. So on the back side, you've got two more dial systems. UH. One is a calendar of the lunar and solar eclipse, and another one UM, basically, like you said, was the sports calendar. The Olympics are coming up than four years

after that, there'll be more Olympics, so four years. So on the front, it was at tracked the day right. That was the big the big front face of it. I believe it did. Um. And then on the back when it's when it's tracking eclipses um that that actually so chuck. When you make a clock, the whole purpose of a clock is so any guy can come along and be like, oh, it's this day right. So you

want your clock to be accurate. The problem is if you're tracking just the solar calendar, you're tracking just the movement of the moon, your clock is going to or your calendar is eventually going to fall out a sink and all of a sudden, something like one of the solstic says, your summer solstice is gonna show up in December after eighteen years, right. So to do that, and this has been like one of the big things that clockmakers and calendar makers have had to deal with forever.

You have to figure out how to reconcile the movement of the sun and the moon with your calendar so that it stays up to date literally right and mechanically but also mathematically right. So several great thinkers figured out that if you take um the tracking of the moon and extrapolated by enough times, it will eventually sync up years down the line with the solar calendar. I think over the course of like nineteen years, and this is

what's called the metonic cycle. Right, there's like five hundred and thirty four phases of the moon in one nineteen year period, and if you can track that, then you can keep your calendar in sync. This is the level of sophistication that the the antick, THEA mechanism operates on. And to this point, we did not realize that the ancient Greeks had this level of understanding of astronomy. Yeah, it was. It was a big It was a big fine for a lot of reasons, and that's one of

them for sure. Yeah. And one of the reasons that we know that they knew this and we're not just kind of putting our own ideas onto it is when they use that computer tomography, they found inscriptions on all these different gears which basically said how they work and what they track, which is another reason this find was so amazing. It basically had an instruction manual engraved on it. That's right, and we will talk more about that right

after this. All right, So you're talking about the inscriptions, um, Like you said, it was a user's guide. If there's going to be a sophisticated piece of equipment, like, uh, this computer, it's gonna come with a book that says here's how you use it. Uh. So the finding I mean, they're doing a pretty good job of discovering the stuff on their own, but then finding the user's guide and piecing that together became even a bigger part of the puzzle.

It did. And then that user guy. It also too if like you're an anthropologist from five years in the future and you happened upon a user guide to a mac or something, right, it also describes like the level of technology that the people who built this computer had, Like in writing, it says, this is what we know, this is what we understand. So again, this backdated the understanding of astronomy among the Greeks too, far earlier than

we'd ever given them credit for. And it confirmed a lot of stuff that had been thrown out over the years as flights of fancy your imagination by writers who had cited this kind of understanding um of the people of their time, and later historians were like, these people were just just making up and it was a lucky guess. This this mechanism has helped show No, these these guys actually knew what they were talking about. Yeah. One of

those was UM. There was a belief, uh, well by some but not held by others, that UM ancient Greeks had calendars where they excluded certain days to adjust the lengths of the months. A lot of people like, no, no, no no, no, there's there's no way that they were that sophisticated this machine basically, and the accompanying guide book proved it to be true, which is pretty great. And because of its sophistication, there a list of people from that time that they think may have had a hand

in this UM. Of course, Archimedes, he's gonna be in there anytime something specialist found. Yeah, and there's actually writing about Archimedes creating a like a a sphere, a three dimensional model that actually doesn't really sound like the antithera mechanism now, but it will be on any list if you find something that, like any mechanism, is sophisticated. Hipparchus, who I think, I don't know if we talked about

him yet or not. He's a mathematician and astronomer, and uh, I think he the time period worked out for him, so he could have been one of the people involved. My money's on him, you know, yeah, or his student Poseidonest Okay, was that Posidonius? Yeah, I like Poseidoness. I'm sure he did too, because that makes him sound like a Greek god. Yeah. Uh. There are also some other hints, you know, trying to piece together the mystery. UM. One of the inscriptions refers to an athletic event in Rhodes,

which is where Hipparcus taught, where his school was. Yeah, and there's a man named Alexander Jones. He's a specialist at n y U and that's what he said. My money's on roads. Is that that's where this thing came from, Yeah, Hipparcus, Yeah, maybe Poseidoness. The other thing that helps is UM, well, it doesn't help necessarily UM Hipparcus's case, but it kind

of excludes Archimedes. Some researchers um looked at all Babylonian records of eclipses and tried to sink this thing up, and apparently they were able to exclude hundreds of different possibilities and settled on two oh five b c E being the start date for the mechanism. Yeah, I think it's a little older than they originally thought, right, Yeah, they were thinking fifty two hundred BC, and they're like, no, two oh five is probably the date that this thing

was intended to be set to. Because again, this thing's tracking the movements of the bodies in the heavens based on the movement of the sun in the moon, and how do you track that by tracking eclipses? So you would want to set it to an eclipse because there has to be some starting point to set it to, right, So they figured it was two oh five. Well, Archimedes, as you remember, we did a whole episode on him.

We did someone the Death Ray. Yes, um, he was killed by a Roman soldier in two twelve, um because he wouldn't pay attention to the soldier who was telling him to um, pay tension, I think. But he was killed in two twelve, so that probably excludes him. He was so smart he knew that of an eclipse was coming in seven years and wanted his mechanism to start. Then he was so broke he couldn't pay attention. Here we hear that one. No, this is my first time

but hearing that joke. Yeah, yeah, those are good, you know. In the burn contest or whatever your mama jokes. Yeah, yeah, kids, it's a good one though. Uh what else? What else you got here? Did not think that was going to make an appearance in the UM. Well since then, there have been uh ten models, at least ten um that

have been built kind of recreating this thing. Um. There was a watchmaker that um got into it, and of course that was a pretty uh the way the things put together, it seems like a watching clockmaker would be an ideal, stand it. Yeah, made one. Well, they made three of this watch and it's it's like a watch verse and of it. That's pretty amazing. It's pretty cool. I wonder how much they went for those three. Oh, I'm sure they were pretty cheap. Somebody made one out

of Legos. Yeah. Was it a Lego set or was it just someone made a Lego model? Oh, they made a Lego model. It was like an Apple engineer. I didn't know. I thought it might have been a Lego set, like a very obscure Lego set. Uh not yet. I'll be the engineers, like, I'll sell you these plans Lego if you want them. Old Kirk check. There's one thing that um, it's amazing when we're like, wow, you know this,

this knowledge is even older than we we thought. And a lot of people um point out that in the West, Yes, it took until the fourteen the fourteenth century for this knowledge to come about. We likely got it from um Muslims Muslim scholars, but it's possible that it came to the West via Muslim scholars from the Greeks. So this knowledge was around the Muslims that were interacting with the Weeks gained this knowledge and they had themselves until they

finally interacted with us in the West in the fourteenth century. Right, it's pretty amazing. But other people are like, yeah, that's great. Why didn't the Greeks build on this. If they had this sophisticated and understanding of how to track time and the movement of the heavenly bodies, why did they stop there? Well, they may not have. They did, that's the thing. Well, no, I mean until we find the next thing that was

years after that that we previously didn't know about. Now the point is like, why didn't they build stuff that survived and came down to this day and they didn't, Like there's there's incontrovertibly they did not build on it or else we would have it today. And Arthur C. Clark is saying, if they had built on this level of sophistication and it had continued uninterrupted today, we'd be traveling amongst the stars by now, after two thousand years

of having this knowledge. I don't see how anyone can say that, though, How can you say that they'll never find another mechanism after this that built on that? You won't. What I'm saying is that knowledge wasn't built on, and built on, and built on and built on uninterrupted. Oh so they may have built on. They could have, but for what from what we understand that they didn't. My money's on finding something else that makes a little more sense out of this. Well, they did find something else.

In three a man in Beirut was in a bizarre and found some weird geared mechanism, and they figured out that it was a sixth century ce Um calendar, like a geared calendar. It's the second oldest geared mechanism known to humankind for now, after the anti Cathera mechanism. We may find an entire civilization underwater. No, but you never know, alright, you never know, You never know. I'm sure. Before they on this, they were saying that they were never advanced

enough to make something like this. Yeah, the point is that that they weren't advanced enough. The point is is they didn't build on this advancement until we find out that they have right. Well, whatever whatever came in and broke that building on it and interrupted it, that was That sucks because we could be far more advanced than we are. It could have been a volcano that covered a laboratory and ash that sunk underwater, and that's where

the underwater civilization has been. Yeah, you never know in the lab Uh. If you want to know more about the anti Kate Thera mechanism, you just try your hand at spelling that. It's fun to say, isn't it. Yeah, And it's easy to spell if he sounds um and do that in the search bar at how stuff works. And since they said search parts, time for listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this mea culpa. Hey, guys, absolutely love stuff you should know and have listened to every episode

many more than once. You keep me company on many a long commute. While I was listening to the Void That Manuscript podcast, which was awesome, I noticed Chuck said a possible explanation was mental illness. Josh said, yes, like an autistic monk. I'm sure you know this, but autism is a developmental disorder, not a mental illness. Behavioral therapist who worked with autistic children. That makes me very sensitive

these matters. Thanks for your great work. My favorite ever was Berlin Wall and then it's from Tricia Flowers, and I think her subject line was I still love you guys. Uh So, we've gotten quite a lot of feedback on this, and I'll let you take it away. It was a mistake. Yeah, it's totally misspoke. Yeah, I don't think that autism is a form of mental illness. What I should have said and meant to say was or an autistic monk or a monk with autism, I think is the proper way

to put it. Yeah, so not like yeah, sometimes in the heat of the moment, sure like or as but yes, no, I don't think that those two are the same. Yeah, So all apologies people. We we certainly don't think that, and I always want to correct ourselves, so, especially when something we'd say accidentally causes distress among people. There's no and to let that stand. Agreed, yeah uh yeah, So thank you Tricia. We appreciate you um writing in to let us. We'll set us straight, call us out, whatever

you wanna call it in a very nice way. Yes uh. And if you want to set us straight or say whatever, you can get in touch with us via s y s K podcast on Twitter. You can send us an email, the Stuff Podcast, the House, Stuff Works dot com. You can hang out with us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff we should Know and has always hang out with us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com