New Research Sheds Light on Original Antikythera Mechanism

We've caught wind of a new conversation happening about the artifact that inspired our latest product, Open Antikythera! Here is an excerpt from a recent article summarizing the update:

"Experts think these gears predicted the positions of the sun, moon and some planets, as well as solar and lunar eclipses. “There’s a calendar, there’s an eclipse prediction dial, and there are inscriptions giving you information about what the stars are doing,” Jo Marchant, author of the 2008 book Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s First Computer, told Smithsonian magazine’s Meilan Solly in 2023. “The dials and the pointers are telling you everything you need to know about the state and workings of the cosmos.”

But now, a study by Esteban Szigety and Gustavo Arenas, two engineers at the National University of Mar del Plata in Argentina, suggests that the Antikythera mechanism didn’t work very well.

Eighty-two pieces of the mechanism have been discovered. Francesco Bini via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0

Crucially, unlike previous efforts to recreate the Mechanism, the researchers also included an accurate model of the Mechanism's triangle-shaped gear teeth, which affect how well gears interlock with one another, and how well the indicators point to the intended astronomical target.

From this model, the researchers found that the Mechanism wasn't very useful at all. It could only be cranked to about four months into the future before it inevitably jammed, or its gears simply disengaged. The user would then have had to reset everything to get it going again — similar to trying to fix a modern printer. Considering that the indicators marking the date cover an entire year, this jamming problem seems unfortunate.

One possibility is that the Antikythera Mechanism was a fancy toy that was never intended to be fully accurate, or that it came with an instruction manual that required users to reset it after a few turns — much like a mechanical watch whose mainspring must be occasionally adjusted by hand."

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The critical study by Esteban Szigety and Gustavo Arenas can be found here on RXIV.

We hope to see more discoveries about this ancient anomaly. Help spread the word and join the conversation with us!