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An Ancient Greek Computer: The Antikythera Mechanism

Tech Meander

5 min read·<br>Jun 10, 2026

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After studying for interviews for a job in tech, I realised that I don’t really know what’s happening behind the keyboard in pretty much any sense. I’m trying to change that and so now we’re here; the first analogue computer.<br>Maybe I’ve gone a touch too far back.<br>The Discovery<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

The Antikythera Mechanism: Scientists are still unsure which piece is the GPUIn 1900, Greek divers looking for sea sponges, off the island of Antikythera, found riches beyond their wildest dreams. As this happened in real life rather than a movie, they got to keep none of it. It did, however, give rise to the first underwater archaeological excavation. The first diver to find it actually surfaced “babbling about a heap of dead naked women”, these women being the statues buried in the sea bed.<br>Amidst the statues, jewellery and other far more interesting tidbits, an ancient lump of metal and decayed wood was also found and transported to the National Archaeology Museum of Athens. This artifact was largely ignored until, in 1902, a politician pointed out that it had a gear in it, marking the recognition of the world’s first positive societal contribution by a politician.

Other Notable Nautical Sponge Related TechnologyWhy You Should Be Impressed<br>This bird, wheel, and broccoli -looking trio turned out to be an orrery, a sick word for the slightly more boring ‘Model Solar System’. About the size of a shoebox, the system is believed to have 57 gears and we have about 30 of them still present.<br>This intricate system of gears was used to predict celestial motion of the 5 known planets, the moon and the sun but also when the next Olympics was occurring. Varying the number of teeth and sizes of these gears, the ancient Greeks were able to create ratios of planetary motion to compute an accurate representation of what the solar system would look like at the time.

This old timey render is more ‘grandparents’ than ancient Greek but still very impressiveIt wasn’t until about 1500 years later that we saw the medieval ages develop intricate machinery like this again. A Yale Professor, Derek J. De Solla Price described it as equivalent to “finding a jet plane in the tomb of King Tut”. Price’s interest in the device was actually a driving factor in maintaining interest that pushed us to reach the conclusions I ape in this article.<br>On a BBC4 podcast about this very same topic, Jo Marchant, Science journalist and author of ‘Decoding the Heavens’ on the Antikythera Mechanism gives an explanation of how the moon’s elliptical orbit is modeled in the mechanism. The Greeks didn’t know about the moon’s elliptical orbit so they built a clever mechanism to mimic what they could see happening.<br>The moon’s cycle was modeled with a four wheel system where it’s arranged in a two up and two down scenario with one of the bottom wheels having a small pin that drives a wheel above it. Due to the gears being slightly off center the pin moves back and forward — giving a slight wobble in its propulsion to the cog above. All of this mounted in such a way to give further input to the eclipse dial. If this doesn’t seem very intuitive, it’s because I’m a bad writer so check out the BBC4 podcast listed below.<br>Who Made It Though<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

“Me” — HipparchusHipparchus made it.<br>Like all definitive internet answers, this is a lie but simple answers just feel right. It’s unlikely Hipparchus had all the skills to put together such a sophisticated piece of machinery. There was also some other Greek astronomers talking about similar devices at the time but all good Cracked.com articles in my youth were very certain so this too. Realistically there were probably multiple similar devices, made with teams of people across multiple trades.<br>Hipparchus seems to have been the fairly definitive authority on the subject of the moon’s irregular orbit at the time. Hipparchus was also from Rhodes, an island that would have been on local trade routes through the area. Hipparchus is known for proving the anomaly of the lunar orbit and it’s thought to be too close to the pin and slot mechanism to be a coincidence. He was definitely in the loop or, at the very least, his work was stolen by someone like me as I show in next section.<br>The Sources But They’re Not a Boring Citation List<br>The wealth of information at our fingertips, when it feels like the whole internet is turning to AI slop, is staggering. It’s a pity my fingertips are such instant gratification seeking idiots.<br>The revelation of dead bodies on the sea bed comes from the beautifully named Hidden History, Volume 2 of 2, EasyRead Super Large 18pt Edition.It’s also here that...