Clever Machines and the Gods Who Make Them: The Antikythera Mechanism and the Ancient Imagination

Abstract

After sitting, cryptically, silently, in the Archaeological Museum in Athens for nearly a century, the Antikythera mechanism only really began to yield up its secrets in the latter part of the twentieth century. To be sure, there had been some speculation that the thing was some kind of planetarium or orrery from within a few years of its discovery, but it was hard for most scholars to really believe this was possible in the cold light of day. Not until Derek de la Solla Price managed to obtain images of the thing using gamma rays in the 1970’s did we finally realize the complexity of its internal gearing, and even then there were plenty of surprises in store for us as imaging technology improved over the next 30 years […]