Dr. Dobb's Journal February 2007
In late November, when what was perhaps the most-analyzed off-year U.S. election ever was finally over and the votes (nearly) all counted, America's mainstream media was confronted with the vexing problem of finding something else to write about. After months of handicapping races and producing pretty graphs of poll numbers and recycling podcasts of candidates' gaffes, journalists were forced to ask themselves, "What's news now?"
The answer was obvious: A two-thousand-year-old chunk of brass recovered off the coast of Greece in 1901.
The Antikythera Mechanism has been puzzling scholars for over a hundred years, because everything known about ancient technology said that it couldn't possibly exist.
Exactly what the device seemed to be has changed as archaeologists and historians of science and physicists examined it over the years. For many years, it was thought to be an astrolabe, despite the fact that the oldest discovered astrolabe dates to 625 ad, some 700 years after the Antikythera Mechanism went down to the sea bottom when a ship went off course rounding the Greek island of Antikythera. Besides, the device was just too intricate to be an astrolabe. As interesting as it would have been to establish that ancient technologists had come up with an astrolabe 700 years earlier than thought, this device had to be something even more revolutionary.
Part of the mystery surrounding the device has been how to put it back together. British physicist Derek De Solla Price spent two decades reconstructing it from the pieces brought up by sponge divers, attempting to work out its function, and through radioactive dating, establishing that it really was as old as thought. Cleverly, he even managed to work out where it had to have been built—on the island of Rhodes.
The Antikythera Mechanism appeared to him to be an arrangement of differential gears configured and inscribed for reading solar and lunar positions. By studying the positions of these gears and the year-ring and inscriptions, Price was able to connect it with Rhodes in the first century BC.
What made the Antikythera Mechanism news again was the publication of an article in the journal Nature in which Cardiff University researchers explained how, with help from X-ray tomography equipment custom-built by Hewlett-Packard, they were able to reconstruct a more detailed model of the device—so good a model that it has answered authoritatively what the device does. It's a four-function calculator with specialized astronomical functions. In precision-tooled brass. From 70 bc.
Let me just say that it's nice to see HP get some good PR for a change.
But I was intrigued by this extraordinary device. Although I found it annoying that the news stories tried to add interest to the device by calling it a "computer," it was clear that this artifact has a significant place in the history of computational machinery, and I wanted to know more about it.
Researching the device on the Web, I came across that information about Price and the Antikythera Mechanism in a paper by naval historian Rob S. Rice. And that was where I went off course.
Rice was concerned with more than the history of the Antikythera Mechanism; he wanted to set the record straight about Rhodes. I was sympathetic. I've been to Rhodes and spent time in the walled Ancient City and stood on the timeless dock trying to visualize that legendary statue and great technological achievement, the Colossus of Rhodes, standing astride the harbor. It must have been an imposing sight from aboard approaching ships.
In 70 bc, the conventional wisdom ran, Rhodes was a conquered subject of Rome, centuries past its glory days. But Rice paints a different picture—no longer a trading power, but a center of learning and technology, where trigonometry was invented and astronomical discoveries made. And where Romans bought clever mechanical devices and had them delivered in ships, ships that sometimes wrecked, taking technological marvels down with them.
Savoring the idea of Rhodes as a near-forgotten center of technological innovation, I drifted farther off course. Googling "Rhodes" turned up many seemingly unrelated topics: The fact that Rhode Island's State drink is milk coffee, short lists of Rhodes scholars, a lot of links to musicians. Funny thing was, as I kept following the associations, the seemingly unrelated topics turned out to be connected in odd ways.
The musical connections, for example, are mostly due to the Rhodes piano, an interesting technological innovation in its own right. Rhode Island is where the virtual world City of Heroes is set, and the virtual world of Second Life is where Nick Rhodes and his colleagues in the band Duran Duran have set up virtual existence. And so on.
Surfing the Web is fun if you can avoid the rocks. The siren song of Rhodes had pulled me off course, but when I found myself linking off Duran Duran to the IMDB.com entry for the movie Barbarella, I knew I was sunk.
Michael Swaine<
Editor-at-Large
mike@swaine.com