Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified.

Episode 9.

The world's oldest computer.

The background story to today's episode might as well be the plot of a science fiction novel.

A couple of divers discover an ancient shipwreck at the bottom of the sea, and among its

decaying ruins, they find a mysterious device that is so technologically sophisticated,

it almost seems to be from the future.

Now, I'm not talking about a Michael Crichton novel.

This actually happened, 116 years ago, off the coast of Greece, near the island of Antikythera.

And the device that came to light is now known as the

Antikythera mechanism. You may have heard about it in the media or online. It's been called

the world's oldest computer. Others have described it as a mechanical cosmos, because it's really

a mechanical model of the solar system that fits in a briefcase,

we're talking about a device that can simulate and predict the motions of the heavenly bodies,

including the sun, the moon, and the visible planets, and show them on a display in motion.

But hold on, how is this possible? How could such an amazing device have

existed so long ago? In fact, even after its discovery, some people refused to believe that

this device was ancient, because it contained dozens of precision gears meshing together,

like in a Swiss watch,

except even more complex, and the conventional wisdom was that precision gears were invented in late medieval Europe.

So some people thought it had to be a modern device that fell into the sea and settled by chance amidst the ruins of an ancient ship.

The funny thing is, we actually have a few surviving texts from antiquity that mention such devices.

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