New Research How Well Did the Mysterious Antikythera Mechanism Actually Work? Historians think the 2,000-year-old device was used to predict the positions of celestial bodies. A new digital simulation suggests that its gears may have frequently malfunctioned Divers found the Antikythera mechanism in a shipwreck in 1900. Zde via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 More than a century ago, a group of sponge divers discovered a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera. It turned out to be the ruins of a cargo vessel dating back some 2,000 years—and hiding a wealth of archaeological treasures. Excavations revealed coins, jewelry, glassware, a seven-foot statue of Hercules and three life-sized marble horses. But the site’s most famous find is a mysterious green gadget: the Antikythera mechanism. Known as “the world’s first computer,” the damaged object was once a bronze box that measured about a foot tall and featured a system of interlocking gears. Only a third of the original device survives: 82 corroded fragments, including 30 gear wheels. Experts think these gears predicted the positions of the sun, moon and some planets, as well as solar and lunar eclipses. “There’s a calendar, there’s an eclipse prediction dial, and there are inscriptions giving you information about what the stars are doing,” Jo Marchant, author of the 2008 book Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s First Computer, told Smithsonian magazine’s Meilan Solly in 2023. “The dials and the pointers are telling you everything you need to know about the state and workings of the cosmos.” But now, a study by Esteban Szigety and Gustavo Arenas, two engineers at the National University of Mar del Plata in Argentina, suggests that the Antikythera mechanism didn’t work very well. Eighty-two pieces of the mechanism have been discovered. Francesco Bini via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 Instead, it was essentially “just a toy prone to constant jamming,” as Live Science’s Paul Sutter writes. “It could only be cranked to about four months into the future before it inevitably jammed, or its gears simply disengaged. The user would then have had to reset everything to get it going again—similar to trying to fix a modern printer.” For the study, which was submitted to the preprint server arXiv, the researchers created a virtual simulation of the Antikythera mechanism, which approximated how the box’s gears would have fit together. This model relied on previous research by several scientists, including Cardiff University astrophysicist Michael Edmunds, who found flaws in the alignment of the Antikythera mechanism’s gears in 2006. His team suggested that the error-prone device was used for display or educational purposes. Szigety and Arenas’ simulation showed that the mechanical errors Edmunds identified would have caused the Antikythera mechanism to fail. If the errors measured in studies like Edmunds’ are accurate, “the mechanism would not have even been able to move, because it would have jammed or also the teeth would have disengaged,” Szigety tells New Scientist’s Alex Wilkins. “One tooth would rotate and the other wouldn’t rotate.” Experts think the device was used to predict the timing of eclipses and other solar events. Francesco Bini via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 However, Szigety thinks it’s unlikely that the gear box never moved, proposing instead that it didn’t have as many mechanical errors as Edmunds concluded. “How could it be that someone invested so much time and so much effort for it to not work in the end?” he says to New Scientist. But as Edmunds tells the publication, “Even if you do come back down to smaller errors that allow it to work, then the major conclusion of my paper isn’t altered—that the lunar pointer on the front was not particularly accurate.” The device has been on display in Athens’ National Archaeological Museum for decades. Any visitor can see why the artifact remains so enigmatic: After 2,000 years underwater, the Antikythera mechanism’s bronze turned into brittle atacamite, a mineral that distorted the device’s measurements. As such, today’s researchers don’t have access to exact dimensions. “Any attempt to apply precision measurements on the current condition of the gears [and] axes includes the effect of the deformation,” Aristeidis Voulgaris of the Thessaloniki Directorate of Culture and Tourism in Greece, tells New Scientist. “In this way, we cannot say that ‘according to our precise measurements, the mechanism never functioned.’” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.