In the spring of 1900, a party of Greek sponge divers returning from North Africa was forced by a storm to take shelter in the lee of the small island of Antikythera, which lies between Crete and Kythera. After the storm passed, one of the divers, Elias Stadiatis, put on a weighted suit and an airtight helmet that was connected by an air hose to a compressor on the boat, and went looking for giant clams, with which to make a feast that evening.
The bottom of the sea dropped sharply, and the diver followed the underwater cliff to a shelf that was about a hundred and forty feet below the surface. On the other side of the shelf, an abyss fell away into total darkness. Looking around, Stadiatis saw the remains of an ancient shipwreck. Then he had a terrible shock. There were piles of bodies, all in pieces, covering the ledge. He grabbed one of the pieces before surfacing in order to have proof of what he had seen. It turned out to be a bronze arm. Divers returned the next fall and found a mysterious device that has come to be called \"Antikythera Mechanism.\"
Researchers, led by the German philologist Albert Rehm, thought that the Mechanism appeared much too complex to be an astrolabe. Rehm suggested that it might possibly be the legendary Sphere of Archimedes, which Cicero had described in the first century B.C. as a kind of mechanical planetarium, capable of reproducing the movement of the sun, the moon, and the five planets that could be seen from Earth without a telescope—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Still others, acknowledging the artifact’s complexity, thought that it must have come from a much later shipwreck, which may have settled on top of the ancient ship (even though the Mechanism had plainly been crushed under the weight of the ship’s other cargo).
Price believed that the Mechanism was an ancient “computer,” which could be used to calculate astronomical events in the near or distant future: the next full moon, for example. He realized that the inscriptions on the large dial were calendrical markings indicating months, days, and the signs of the zodiac, and postulated that there must have been pointers, now missing, that represented the sun and the moon and possibly the planets, and that these pointers moved around the dial, indicating the position of the heavenly bodies at different times.
