TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Scientists Decipher How Ancient Computer Worked

ADVERTISEMENT

The New York Times

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 31, 2008

After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses, but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism's concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, on Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the moon's orbital course.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.

Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism.

The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.

In the journal report, the team led by mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth, of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project in Cardiff, Wales, said the month names "are unexpectedly of Corinthian origin," which suggested "a heritage going back to Archimedes."

Inscriptions also showed that one of the instrument's dials was used to record the timing of the pan-Hellenic games, a four-year cycle that was "a common framework for chronology" by the Greeks, the researchers said.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT