Ancient technology continues to impress and amaze us. What we do with wonders of electronic computers, people in ancient Greece could do with mechanic assemblage of cogs, gears, dials and cranks. Antikythera Mechanism was a grime covered relic recovered from a Roman shipwreck by Greek sponge divers in 1901. It has been now hailed as the supercomputer of the past. The device has been dated back to 100 BC and it has been revealed that the device could do a lot of astronomical stuff. Besides tracking positions of sun, planets and moon, and predicting the occurrence of an eclipse, it could with precision determine when next Olympics would fall.
Members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) used X-ray scans to make out the structure and markings on the device. The front of the device is a single dial marked with Greek and Egyptian calendar, while two dials at the back display lunar cycles and eclipses. A 19-year calendar on the back of the Mechanism has Corinthian names and has led researchers to believe that the device might have been constructed in Corinthian colonies in north-western Greece or Syracuse in Sicily. The Sicily bit leads many to establish a link with Archimedes but scientists believe that the mechanism was created some decades after his death. The device is pure ingenuity and writing in Nature captures all there has been discovered about it. Study author Tony Freeth of Cardiff, Wales, a member of the AMRP captures it best when he says the Antikythera Mechanism:
has at its heart a real genius about it.
