
THE HISTORY OF THE MECHANISM
The remains of the Mechanism were discovered in 1900 in the wreck of an ancient Roman merchant ship which sank off the coast of Antikythera - a small Greek island lying between Crete and the Peloponnese peninsula. They are now displayed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
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Researchers worked for many years to reconstruct the Mechanism and understand its purpose. The inner gears are only visible in X-ray scans, so the full layout and function of the gears in the back part of the Mechanism was only resolved in 2006. Further analysis of the inscriptions on the machine has now given us a better understanding of how the whole instrument worked, but many details are still the subject of heated debate.
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The origins of the Mechanism are shrouded in mystery - there are very few records left from that era. We don’t know where it was made or who created it. There are hints in ancient texts that the first machines were invented by Archimedes, but they were almost certainly simpler than the highly developed form we see in the Mechanism.
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In AD 506 (over 600 years after the Mechanism was built) Cassiodorus wrote to the philosopher Boethius on behalf of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, and described something called the “sphere of Archimedes” in which the mechanical art:
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“.. has made a second Sun take its course; it has fashioned another zodiacal circle by human cogitation; it has shown the Moon restored from its eclipse by the light of the art – it has set in revolution a little machine, pregnant with the cosmos, a portable sky, a compendium of all that is, a mirror of nature, in the image of the ether in its unimaginable mobility … What a thing it is for a human being to make this thing, which can be a marvel even to understand!”
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Visit our knowledgebase to learn more about the Mechanism; the history of the Greek mathematicians and engineers who built it and the ongoing research