It initially looked to be nothing more than a rusted lump of some type when it was found in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece, not far from Antikythera, in 1900. Yet in 1902, archaeologist Valerios Stais hypothesized that what is now known as the "Antikythera mechanism" was a type of astronomy-based clock after looking at the gear embedded in it. He was outnumbered because the majority believed that something so sophisticated had to have entered the wreck after its other, 2,000-year-old artifacts. It was believed that until 1,500 years later, nothing comparable had ever existed.
In 1951, British historian Derek J. de Solla Price began investigating the object, and by 1974, he had shown that it was in fact a device from 150–100 BC Greece. He realized it moved hands on the device's face with bronze gears meshing, in accordance with the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern that ancient astronomers used to predict eclipses.
Modern imaging technology had identified all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism's gears by the time a digital reproduction of it was published in 2009.
By putting the pieces together, it became apparent that the Antikythera mechanism could forecast not only the locations of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—planets that the Greeks were familiar with—but also the positions of the sun, moon, and eclipses. There is even a rotating black and white stone that shows the moon's phases. Apple developer Andrew Carol built a working Lego model of the gadget to demonstrate how it works.
Before advanced imaging technology made it easier to see, the ancient Greek letters on the device's components were too small to read—some of its characters are only 1/20th of an inch wide. A global group of experts shared fresh information gleaned from these papers in June 2016. About 3,500 characters have been read so far in the description of the device.
The text validates the capabilities of the Antikythera mechanism with a few unusual twists. The inscription refers to upcoming eclipses by color, which shows that earlier generations thought they held some type of significance. Second, it appears that several people worked together to create the device on the Greek island of Rhodes, and it was probably not the only one of its kind. It turns out that the Greeks' understanding of mechanics and astronomy was even greater than we previously believed.
