Mohammed Misbah Tamanna, IX, The Blossoms School, Aligarh

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   Between the years of 76 and 67 BC, a ship containing various items such as statues, coins, pottery, unique glassware, jewellery etc. capsized near the Greek island of Antikythera. And there it lay under the sea not to be discovered until thousands of years later. The ancient shipwreck was finally found in April, 1900 by a group of sponge divers (as the name suggests, their purpose is to retrieve natural sponges for human use). Then, in July 1901, an unusual artefact believed to be a part of the ships cargo was retrieved. An year later, an archaeologist Valerios Stais, while going through the artefacts, identified an artefact as a gear wheel. Since all the artefacts were apparently worthy of conservation, the mechanism was ignored until 1951.
   After almost two decades, the first publication on the Antikythera mechanism was made in 1974 by physicist and historian Derek de Solla Price. It was discovered to be the earliest true computer in the world, a complex clockwork of 30 meshing bronze gears. Detailed images of the mechanism show that it originally had 37 gear wheels which enabled it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun though the zodiac, to predict the eclipses and even to model the irregular orbit of the moon. It was concluded by 1974, that it was made during 87 BC and was lost in the shipwreck later a few years later. The original mechanism came out of the Mediterranean as a single encrusted piece.    Soon after, it fractured into three major pieces. Xenophon Moussas, an astrophysicist at Athens University, theorized in 2006 that the boat on which the mechanism was found, may have been headed to Rome as part of a triumphal parade for emperor Julius Caesar in the 1st century BCE.
   The marine explorer Jacques Cousteau and his team dived to the Antikythera shipwreck, shortly after Price's publication in 1976. They found coins from the 1st century BCE and a few smaller pieces of the mechanism. A few years after that, the famous scientist, Richard Feynman visited the museum in Athens, where the mechanism was kept. Before the invention of digital computers, there had been many analogue computers which ranged from a simple abacus to devices which could predict tides. The Antikythera mechanism, which was designed to calculate the dates and predict astronomical phenomena, has been called the earliest analogue computer. The mechanism was present in a wooden container ( which was approximately the size of a shoebox), the clockwork being advanced for its time. It had a hand crank, which the user could use to turn the time forward and backward.
   This also leads to the question that if such complicated mechanism did exist as early as 2000 years ago, then why didn't we see more like them? It seems that the information needed to make such a device was lost through time, perhaps because it was kept a secret back then, or it was too expensive to create. Such astronomical clocks didn't reappear in Europe until the 14th century. The mechanism tracked the lunar calendar, predicted eclipses, track the phases and position of the moon and also tracked the seasons and ancient festivals like the Olympics. The calendar was based on the time from one moon to the next and it also allowed the user to envision the season, which could have been useful for agriculture.
   The mechanism had two dials that rotated to show both lunar and solar eclipses. The most sophisticated thing the mechanism did was to model out the moon's elliptical orbit. The mechanism also included the pointers for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, all of which are easily visible in the sky. The parts that worked these planetary pointers are gone but the inscriptions confirms that the planetary motion was modelled mathematically using numerous complex gears and that it was highly accurate. To conclude, I would like to say that the Antikythera mechanism was a highly complex and useful device (which may have been used by rich families or used in schools) that was technologically too far ahead for its time. Scientists and researchers have learned a lot about our past through it and it is also possible that more advanced devices may have existed earlier and in other pats of the globe. The mechanism also appeared in Google Doodles on 17 May, 2017, marking the 115th anniversary of its discovery.

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