Just over a century ago sponge divers off the coast of Antikythera, an island northwest of Crete, discovered a first-century B.C. Roman shipwreck. They later returned to the site, accompanied by archaeologists, and spent the next year diving 200 feet down to the shipwreck (without scuba gear or air tanks) to recover amphoras, statues, jewelry, coins and pottery. The divers also brought up something puzzling: a complex mechanical device (now on display in the National Museum of Athens) consisting of a wooden frame and 32 bronze gears—some of them with fragmented Greek inscriptions. One of the gears was inscribed […]
