The Machine That Shouldn't Exist: Secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism

2026-06-05 · Impossible Objects · 2 min read

In the spring of 1901, Greek sponge divers salvaging an ancient shipwreck off the tiny island of Antikythera hauled up bronze statues, jewelry, amphorae — and one corroded lump of metal about the size of a shoebox. It was shipped to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and largely forgotten. Then the lump cracked open, and researchers saw something that should not have existed: precisely cut bronze gearwheels, more than two thousand years old.

Dated to roughly the second or first century BC, the device — now famous as the Antikythera Mechanism — is the oldest known analog computer. Nothing of comparable mechanical complexity appears in the historical record for well over a thousand years, until the great astronomical clocks of medieval Europe.

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