The Antikythera mechanism, pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses and tracked the Olympic Games calendar around 100 BC, and nothing of comparable complexity would appear again on Earth for the nex

The Antikythera mechanism, pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses and tracked the Olympic Games calendar around 100 BC, and nothing of comparable complexity would appear again on Earth for the nex

In 1901, sponge divers surfaced off the rocky islet of Antikythera, in the strait between Crete and the Peloponnese, reporting corpses and horses on the seabed. They had stumbled onto a Roman-era shipwreck, and among the bronze statues and amphorae the crew hauled up over the next year was a corroded lump of metal the size of a shoebox. It sat largely ignored in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens until an archaeologist noticed a bronze…