6. A Millennia-Old Device That Allowed People to Make Astronomical Predictions Decades in Advance
When researchers were able to take a good look at the Antikythera Mechanism and its innards, it became clear that the mysterious archaeological find had to be some kind of calculation device. However, whether it worked the way that Professor Price had reasoned was still up in the air. We now know that the device enabled users to tell how the skies would look for decades to come. That included the positions of the Sun and Moon, lunar phases, the paths of planets, and even eclipses. Cicero was one of several writers from antiquity who had mentioned the existence of such devices, but the Antikythera Mechanism is the only one ever recovered.
Unfortunately, the technology was lost in the Roman era, and the only known sample we know of ended up at the bottom of the sea, its secrets forgotten for two millennia. Current researchers have benefited greatly from the leaps and bounds that scanning technology has taken in recent years. In the first few decades after the Antikythera Mechanism’s discovery, the device’s advanced state of corrosion made it difficult for scholars to properly tell just what was inside the box, let alone decipher its significance. Observers could see that some of the mechanism’s fragments contained what seemed to be Greek letters and words, but they were so obscured by corrosion that they were indecipherable.
