![]() Karakalos and his wife Emily painstakingly counted the visible teeth in 1974 Price published a heroic 70-page account of the machine (D. ![]() The British science historian Derek de Solla Price and the Greek nuclear physicist Charalampos Karakalos made X- and gamma-ray images of the fragments in 1971. The gears elicited interest, but it was not until investigations delved beneath the surface that the box started to yield its secrets. But as the wood dried and shrivelled, the lump cracked open, and on, archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that there were gear-wheels inside. The Antikythera wreck was to yield a stunning collection of bronze and marble statues, pottery, glassware, jewellery and coins it was also to claim the life of one of the divers, not yet aware of the risk of the bends when diving with an oxygen hose.Īs busy museum staff struggled to piece together statues and vases, a formless, corroded lump of bronze and wood lay unnoticed. After grabbing the larger-than-life arm of a bronze figure as proof of his find, he returned to the surface to inform his companions. Instead of sponges nestled on the sea bed, the shape of a great ship loomed out of the blue. Once the winds had eased, Elias Stadiatis dived 42 metres to a rocky shelf to look for late additions to his hard-earned haul. In 1900 a party of Greek sponge divers sought shelter from a storm in the lee of the barren, rocky islet of Antikythera. Most texts leave out vital technical details, so you need skills to be transmitted directly. As François Charette, a historian of science at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, points out, “for the translation of technology, you can't rely solely on texts”. It's tempting to think that some mechanisms, or at least the ability to build them, came west at the same time. ![]() Shortly after that, mechanical clocks appeared in the West, although nobody knows exactly where or how. Wright, though, favours the idea that they are linked by an unbroken tradition: “I find it as easy to believe that this technology survived unrecorded, as to believe that it was reinvented in so similar a form.” The timing of the shift to the West might well have been driven by the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, after which much of the caliphate's knowledge spread to Europe. It could be argued that the similarities between the medieval technology and that of classical Greece represent separate discoveries of the same thing - a sort of convergent clockwork evolution.
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