8. A Complex First Century BC Calculation Device
When they worked together, the mysterious box’s contents amounted to a complex clockwork mechanism. Valerios Stais reasoned that it must have been some kind of astronomical calculation device. However, most scholars at the time pushed back against that notion. They argued that the device, which came to be known as the Antikythera Mechanism, was too complex to have been manufactured in the first century BC. Instead, they concluded that it must have been made centuries later, then been lost at sea, and came to rest by mere coincidence atop the earlier archaeological debris of the Antikythera Wreck.
The upshot was that further research into the Antikythera Mechanism was abandoned for decades. It did not resume until the 1950s, when a Yale professor who specialized in the history of science, Derek John de Solla Price, took an interest in the device. Over the next two decades, he conducted intensive research into the mechanism, and used gamma-rays and x-rays to examine its innards, before he published a seventy-page paper on his findings in 1974. In it, Price demonstrated that the device did, indeed, date to the first century BC, and that as Valerios Stais had guessed seven decades earlier, the mechanism was an astronomical clock.
