16. Examining an Overlooked Box
In 1902, archaeologist Valerios Stais finally took a close look at the wooden box’s contents, and was surprised to spot a gear. The corrosion and encrustation were painstakingly cleared from the box’s deteriorated bronze lump, which was eventually separated into more than eighty distinct pieces. They included roughly thirty meshing bronze gears, the largest of which possessed 223 teeth and had a diameter of 14 centimeters.
What had once appeared as a severely corroded chunk of bronze turned out to be a complex clockwork device. Stais asserted that it was a mechanism used to make astronomical calculations. That seemed too radical for scholars who were unwilling to accept that such technology could have existed in the ancient world. So they reasoned that the find, which came to be known as the Antikythera mechanism, was not actually from antiquity.
