Celestial computers of ancient Greece

The next important phase in the decipherment of the Antikythera Mechanism starts with Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist and historian of science teaching at Yale University. In 1974, he left us a scientific record of his assessment. This was Gears from the Greeks, a masterful account of how he decoded the Greek computer.

Price took 16 years studying the intricacies of the Greek device. He reported that the Antikythera Mechanism was “one of the most important pieces of evidence for the understanding of ancient Greek science and technology”.

He explained why:

The complex gearing of the Antikythera Mechanism shows a more precise picture of the level of Greco-Roman “mechanical proficiency” than that coming out of the surviving textual evidence: this “singular artifact,” he said of the Antikythera Mechanism, “the oldest existing relic of scientific technology, and the only complicated mechanical device we have from antiquity quite changes our ideas about the Greeks and makes visible a more continuous historical evolution of one of the most important main lines that lead to our civilization”.

Yes, science from the Greeks is a straightforward highway to us. It materialises in technology like the one found in the lump of metal with gears. And that device, housed in a wooden case the size of a shoebox or dictionary, after a tortuous path, became Western technological culture.

Price described the differential gear of the Antikythera Mechanism as the landmark of the computer’s high tech nature. This was the gear that enabled the Antikythera Mechanism to show the movements of the sun and the moon in “perfect consistency” with the phases of the moon. “It must surely rank,” Price said of the differential gear, “as one of the greatest basic mechanical inventions of all time”.

In fact, after the Antikythera Mechanism-like devices almost vanished in late antiquity, the differential gear did its own disappearance for more than a millennium and a half. It reappeared in 1575 in a clock made by Eberhart Baldewin in Kassel, Germany.

It was this gear from the Greeks, and the clockwork culture that moved it along, that advanced the technology of cotton manufacture in the 18th century. Eventually, the differential gear ended up in cars in late 19th century.

Price complained that the West judges the Greeks from scraps of building stones, statues, coins, ceramics, and a few selected written sources. Yet, when it comes to the heart of their lives and culture, how they did their work in agriculture, how they built the perfect Parthenon, what kind of mechanical devices they had for doing things in peace and war, how they used metals, and, in general, what the Greeks did in several fields of technology, we have practically nothing from the Greek past.

“Wheels from carriages and carts survive from deep antiquity,” he said, “but there is absolutely nothing but the Antikythera fragments that looks anything like a fine gear wheel or small piece of mechanism. Indeed the evidence for scientific instruments and fine mechanical objects is so scant that it is often thought that the Greeks had none.”

Price died in 1983.

In 2005, a British mathematician and filmmaker, Tony Freeth, put together a group of international scientists to get to the bottom of the ancient Greek computer.