When we first looked at the results, it was astonishing. We've had to rethink the history of technology completely as a result of this single object. It's such a clever, extraordinarily sophisticated machine, completely. Completely shocking for ancient Greece. 120 years ago, sponge divers discovered a shipwreck off the tiny island of Antikythera in Greece, and what they found changed our understanding of human history forever. Among the treasure trove were marble statues, elegant vases, glistening jewelry and ancient coins and what looked to be a hunk of corroded metal that no one knew quite what to do with. It was not recognised at all as being anything interesting when it was discovered, it was just a corroded lump about the size of a large dictionary. But when in 1902, it was discovered that there were gear wheels inside it, everyone suddenly got rather excited. This is the first shock because anything from ancient Greece simply shouldn't have gear wheels. These were precision gears with teeth about a millimetre long. And this was just completely, completely shocking.
And the Antikythera mechanism has captured the imagination of archaeologists, mathematicians and scientists ever since. It's a dedicated, calculating machine and it uses bronze gear wheels to calculate the cycles of the cosmos – the cosmos being the sun, the moon, the planets against the stars and wind it forward 10 years and you can know where the sun and the moon is going to be, where the planets are. But the question of why the ancient Greeks created such a device has plagued experts since its discovery. I think it was conceived as a calculating machine that would calculate the theories they had. They had astronomical theories but could calculate those at the turn of a handle. So it would it would demonstrate how you could look ahead, say: 'What's the position of the moon going to be in five years time?'. You would turn the handle, it would tell you almost immediately. This is a massive step forward in the history of science and technology. Something we take for granted now, but in those days that the idea that your scientific theories could be mechanised, the predictions could be mechanised was absolutely astonishing.
Now kept in a museum in Greece, the 2000-year-old device is split into 82 fragments and much of it is missing. But in the years since this discovery, modern technology has vastly advanced what we know about the mechanism. In the 1970s, a team x-rayed the device and the first secrets were revealed, dozens of cogs hidden within it. But it wasn't until 3D X-ray technology came along that they could separate these guys out. We took an eight ton x-ray machine to Athens, installed it in the museum, and we took x-ray data of all the 82 surviving fragments of the mechanism. And when we first looked at the results, it was astonishing because it showed us not only all the gear wheels in three dimensions so we could separate them, but it showed us all these new inscrip tions in the fragments as well.
A new world of secrets was revealed, a user guide hidden within the folds of corroded bronze. This was a wonderful revelation. Out of that data has come nearly all the breakthroughs in recent decades, came the discovery that it predicted eclipses, that it followed the variable notion of the moon. Previous experts had been able to model the back of the mechanism up until this point. But these inscriptions helped Tony and his colleagues with their latest model, which focuses on the front of the device. There's thousands of text characters in ancient Greek which tell us how it works. It displayed the ancient Greek cosmos – the sun, moon and planets – in a sort of ring system. It brought back the history of technology to a much earlier time. It is completely astonishing that the ancient Greeks firstly had the conception of making this technology and secondly the ability to actually physically make it. We've had to rethink the history of technology completely as a result of this single object.
The great Arthur C. Clarke said if the ancient Greeks had understood the capabilities of the technology they created, then they would have reached the moon within 300 years, and we'd now been exploring the nearest stars. Now Tony and his team will take their theoretical model and use ancient Greek techniques to build a physical model of the mechanism. And modern technology may reveal more secrets of the ancient world still. There were certainly, in the ancient world, more devices like the Antikythera Mechanism. It wasn't unique. I think the only real hope of finding another machine like the Antikythera Mechanism is from a shipwreck. The hopeful thing is there are thousands of shipwrecks down there under the Mediterranean. Some of them at very deep levels. But the diving technology is advancing so much that it's becoming possible to explore quite deep wrecks.
To understand the technological world we live in today, we need to understand its history, what the Antikythera Mechanism tells us is that that history is different than what we thought, that it started earlier, that it developed in this incredible flourishing of this sophisticated technology, and then it seemed to go backwards. We kind of take it for granted, I think, in the modern world that technology will just keep on advancing. But throughout history, this hasn't always been the case. The history of technological development doesn't go in a straight line. It develops in fits and starts and sometimes gets lost and forgotten.
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