IT WAS ONE of the most significant discoveries ever made at a shipwreck site: the 2000-year-old “Antikythera Mechanism”, retrieved by sponge divers in Greece 120 years ago, is reckoned to have been the world’s first-known analogue computer. But it was incomplete, and its workings have baffled scientists ever since.
Now researchers at University College London (UCL) report that they have solved a major piece of the puzzle, and could be in a position to recreate the bronze device, the most complex piece of engineering to have survived from the ancient world, as it originally worked.