Jo Marchant. Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer. 2008. Windmill Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2009.
The other day I ran across an interesting-looking book in one of the vintage shops I frequent. What's more, it appeared to have been signed by its author, presumably at some book festival or other, which added even further to its cachet.
Of course I'd heard of the
Antikythera Mechanism. As I recall, it figured in an old episode of
Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980), and since then it's been used as the principal plot point in the latest - hopefully last - Indiana Jones movie:
The conceit there was that it was an Ancient Greek time machine, built by
Archimedes of Syracuse, which some Nazi was trying to use to go back and change the course of history so that the Germans would win the Second World War.
As is so often the case, the truth in this case is far more interesting than the fiction. Jo Marchant and her publishers seem to have found it difficult to settle on a subtitle adequate to the significance of this artefact: "
Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-old Computer and the Century Long Search to Discover Its Secrets" was the first one they came up with. The paperback edition simplified this to "
Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer."
Is it a computer? Well, that depends on what you mean by the term. Certainly it's an extremely complex calculating machine used - it would appear - to collate and chart astronomical phenomena. So, while it's an analogue rather than a digital device, the concensus of opinion seems to be that "computer" is indeed an appropriate description for it.
Jo Marchant, an award-winning science writer who also has a PhD in Microbiology, has put together a fascinating read. She charts the story of this strange piece of machinery from its recovery in 1901 from an Ancient Greek shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, to its present day place of honour in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
Like her predecessor in this particular subgenre, Dava Sobel in
Longitude (1995), Marchant assembles a varied cast of heroes and villains along the way. Among the heroes are:
- Derek de Solla Price, who became interested in the mechanism in 1951, after it had been unearthed from the hiding place in which it was concealed during the Nazi occupation of Greece, and who made the first (approximate) reconstruction of it in the early 1970s.
- Michael Wright, who, initially fascinated by Price's monograph Gears from the Greeks (1974), has worked on the mechanism ever since, creating a model in 2006 which is the most accurate so far, and which is now in the Athens museum.
So far so good. There's no doubt that both of these ingenious scholars deserve the warmest praise. Wright appears to have cooperated fully with Marchant's book, which earned him the following encomium in her acknowledgements:
I am greatly indebted to Michael Wright, a gentleman who fielded my never-ending questions with honesty and grace ...
Wright is, in effect, Marchant's equivalent to Dava Sobel's
John Harrison (1693-1776), the working-class hero whose pioneering work on marine chronometers made possible the accurate determining of longitude at sea.
Unfortunately there's something about the Antikythera mechanism which seems to bring out the worst in people. It's a little like that fatal golden
apple of discord inscribed "to the fairest," which led to the shepherd Paris having to make a choice between three contending goddesses, thus causing (inadvertently) the Trojan War.
If one continues reading the acknowledgments to Marchant's book, this is the next paragraph after the one about Michael Wright.
Thanks to Tony Freeth and his colleagues ... who were charming company and of great help when I first researched the Antikythera mechanism. Once I started writing this book, they felt unable to speak to me any further about their work or to be involved in any way. I hope I have done justice to their roles.
This is an unfortunate admission. Dr Tony Freeth is a founding member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project and an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College, London. Much of the more recent work on the mechanism has taken place under his auspices.
Nor did he agree that Marchant had "done justice" to his role in the reconstruction and study of this ancient
orrery. As
Wikipedia article on Marchant's book sums it up:
The author acknowledges ... that none of the principal researchers from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project were involved "in any way" with the writing of the book. The project has published a commentary that sets out problems with the book's account of their work.
The entry continues: "The book's account of
the collaboration between Michael Wright and Allan Bromley is disputed."
This is another area of controversy in Marchant's book. Michael Wright collaborated with the late Australian academic
Allan Bromley, an expert on Charles Babbage's calculating machines, in obtaining accurate X-ray pictures of the Antikythera mechanism in the Athens museum in the early 1990s. It's contended in Marchant's book that Allan Bromley unfairly monopolised these images, failing to grant access to Wright until shortly before Bromley's death from cancer in 2002.
This is, to put it mildly, not how his widow sees it. As you'll see if you click on the following
link, Anne Bromley objects strongly to the way in which her husband is portrayed in the book.
As a result of all this controversy, Jo Marchant decided to publish
her own response to these criticisms:
It seems that Decoding the Heavens is causing some controversy on the web. In recent weeks, some of the researchers working on the Antikythera mechanism, as well as Anne Bromley (second wife of the late Allan Bromley, another Antikythera researcher) have posted comments expressing concern about the way that certain parts of the book are presented.
As you'll know if you have read Decoding the Heavens, the Antikythera mechanism is an emotionally-charged area of research. All of the researchers involved have devoted years if not decades of their lives to solving its mysteries, and that has resulted in a fair amount of passion and rivalry. In fact without those driving forces they probably wouldn't have reached such impressive results ...
Yes, that certainly resembles the "Apple of Discord" theory I outlined above. "Emotionally charged" is probably an understatement, in fact: the "comments" compiled by members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project run to 12 A4 pages! She goes on:
But this also means that there are many disagreements between the various researchers regarding how different parts of the story unfolded, and where the credit for various different discoveries is due. I doubt that any single account could please everyone, but as a journalist I spoke at length to as many people as possible in order to reach my own careful and independent conclusions about what happened. In writing the book I've also tried to give a flavour of the various viewpoints, with different parts of the story seen through the eyes of different people, and it was important to me where possible to portray these scientists as human - reflecting their strengths and weaknesses rather than leaving them as bland, one-dimensional "heroes". I (and my publishers) stand by Decoding the Heavens as an honest and accurate account of the Antikythera story.
My own impression as a reader is that her main cast
is largely sorted into heroes (Price and Wright) and - if not outright villains, less than scrupulous rivals (Bromley and Freeth).
But then, the same could be said of many successful pieces of scientific popularisation. Arthur Koestler's classic history of cosmology,
The Sleepwalkers, for instance, makes no secret of his preference for Johannes Kepler over Galileo Galilei. The latter is portrayed as sly and intellectually dishonest, whereas Kepler's perplexities and contradictions are seen as signs of his immense and painful integrity.
It makes gripping reading, but could hardly be regarded as a definitive statement on the significance of the two in scientific history. The same (as I've mentioned above) is true of Dava Sobel's
Longitude.
The majority of the researchers mentioned in the book are happy with the end result. But of course there are different perspectives and if you are interested in finding out about these then please do look at the comments from members of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. These researchers were very helpful and open when I first started reporting on the Antikythera mechanism, but I should note that after I told them in May 2007 that I planned to write a book, some members - Tony Freeth, Mike Edmunds, Yanis Bitsakis, Xenophon Moussas and John Seiradakis - declined to speak to me further ... They said that to do so would conflict with their own plans for Antikythera books and media projects.
Tony Freeth was named to me as the AMRP team's spokesperson on any matters regarding Decoding the Heavens. I offered him the opportunity to comment on the two chapters regarding the team's work before publication but he declined, and in the nine months since the book came out, none of the team has mentioned any concerns about its content to either me or the publisher. I am sorry to hear at this stage that they believe there are inaccuracies, and any factual errors they raise now will of course be corrected in future reprints.
Fair enough. Marchant then goes on to mention some points which seem to her debatable: whose team it actually was, for instance: Freeth's or Mike Edmunds' ("This is technically correct ... but none of the sources I spoke to were in any doubt that Freeth was the real driving force behind the project"). She concludes: "I think though that most of the comments they have posted come down to differences in interpretation."
Regarding Anne Bromley's comments about the way her late husband is portrayed ... it was not my intention to describe him in a negative way, and I am genuinely surprised by her reaction. The impression I got of Allan Bromley during my research was of a brilliant, lively, forceful, friendly person, who could be manipulative and competitive at times, especially when it came to knowledge and information, but who got things done and was capable of sweeping others along with his enthusiasm. I hope this is the way he comes across in the book, and multiple sources who were close to Bromley in both the UK and Australia have said that they found my account reasonable and fair.
It's good to see Decoding the Heavens provoking discussion though. Please do read the comments and make up your own minds.
That last sentence sounds like very sensible advice. Endless, after all, are the arguments of mages ...
In one of his
philosophical dialogues, the Roman orator Cicero mentions two machines built by Archimedes which were brought back as booty by the Roman General Marcus Claudius Marcellus from the siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE. Unfortunately the Greek inventor himself was killed by a Roman legionary who'd been given orders to arrest him and bring him back to headquarters. So died one of the greatest minds of all time.
I had often heard this celestial globe or sphere mentioned on account of the great fame of Archimedes. Its appearance, however, did not seem to me particularly striking. ... But as soon as Gallus had begun to explain, by his sublime science, the composition of this machine, I felt that the Sicilian geometrician must have possessed a genius superior to any thing we usually conceive to belong to our nature. Gallus assured us, that the solid and compact globe, was a very ancient invention, and that the first model of it had been presented by Thales of Miletus. ... He added, that the figure of the sphere, which displayed the motions of the Sun and Moon, and the five planets, or wandering stars, could not be represented by the primitive solid globe. And that in this, the invention of Archimedes was admirable, because he had calculated how a single revolution should maintain unequal and diversified progressions in dissimilar motions. When Gallus moved this globe, it showed the relationship of the Moon with the Sun, and there were exactly the same number of turns on the bronze device as the number of days in the real globe of the sky. Thus it showed the same eclipse of the Sun as in the globe [of the sky], as well as showing the Moon entering the area of the Earth's shadow when the Sun is in line ...
It should be emphasised that
this, the device described by Cicero, is certainly not
that: the Antikythera mechanism. However, his remarks do confirm that such devices were known in the Ancient world, and that any attempts by earlier commentators to explain away the more complex features of this "celestial globe" as misunderstandings on the Roman lawyer's part can be now be seen to be completely misguided.
The vital significance of the Antikythera mechanism is that, while undoubtedly a wonderful piece of craftsmanship,
it was not unique. The elaborate instructions included on it imply that it was meant for a less-then-expert recipient - some rich collector, perhaps, who wanted it to show off to his friends.
The complexity of the gearing, and the tiny size of many of the components also argue for a long tradition of building such machines. In short, Ancient Greek philosophers and proto-scientists were
not all theory and no practice. And many of the great advances in - for instance - the creation of mechanical clocks, previously attributed to the genius of Renaissance inventors, can now be seen to be far more probably based on the surviving work of ancient craftsmen of this type.
We may never be able to reconstruct definitively the complexities of the Antikythera mechanism. It's too damaged from its two thousand years under the sea - not to mention rough handling at the time it was first found ... and neglect for a number of years after that. The amazing thing is how much of its working has been able to be recovered by the combined work of mechanically minded scientists such as Derek de Solla Price, Michael Wright, Allan Bromley, Tony Freeth, and their many collaborators.
It is not known where the device originated: certainly somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, possibly in Corinth. In 2008 the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project "identified the calendar on the Metonic Spiral as coming from Corinth, or one of its colonies in northwest Greece or Sicily." This led them to posit a possible connection with Syracuse, which was both "a colony of Corinth and the home of Archimedes."
However, more recent research has demonstrated that while this calendar
is of the Corinthian type, it cannot be that of Syracuse. Other suggested points of origin for the device include Pergamon, home of the celebrated
Library of Pergamum, second only in importance to the Library of Alexandria. However:
The ship carrying the device contained vases in the Rhodian style, leading to a hypothesis that it was constructed at an academy founded by Stoic philosopher Posidonius on that Greek island. Rhodes was a busy trading port and centre of astronomy and mechanical engineering, home to astronomer Hipparchus, who was active from about 140-120 BC. The mechanism uses Hipparchus' theory for the motion of the Moon, which suggests he may have designed or at least worked on it.
The device is estimated to have been built in the late second century BCE or the early first century BCE.
How ought one to conclude this strange tale of scholarly rivalry and eventual, triumphant discovery? The Ancient Greeks (and, to a lesser extent, Romans) clearly deserve far more credit for their brilliance than we, their arrogant descendants, gave them credit for. Whoever the genius was who originated this particular class of devices - Archimedes or Hipparchus both seem possible suspects - they were certainly not working in a vaccuum.
Let's face it, there's a huge amount we still don't know about Greek (and Babylonian) science - not to mention the great achievements of their inheritors, the
Islamic scholars of Baghdad and Córdoba, between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, before the Mongol conquest in 1258. The Renaissance inherited far more than we ever guessed from these predecessors. If we have seen further - to paraphrase Newton - it is only by standing on the shoulders of these giants.
Jo Marchant may have jumped the gun slightly in assuming that the mysteries of the Antikythera mechanism had been more or less solved by 2008, the date of her book. It's a fairly venal error, though. Her book remains a rattling good read and - until a better account comes along - well worth the trouble of hunting out.
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