Iconic Machines

Antikythera

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 Antikythera — Volume 1 — The Antikythera Mechanism — A Computer from the Sea What the corroded bronze lumps in Athens turned out to be, how a hand crank once drove the Sun, the Moon and the calendar across two faces of a wooden box, and the long road from a sponge-divers' wreck to a laser-cut kit — the orientation volume for the fifteen-part series
    2. Vol 2 Antikythera — Volume 2 — The Wreck — Sponge Divers, Statues and a Lump of Corroded Bronze How a storm, a crew from Symi and a frightened diver led to the first great underwater salvage, what the ship was carrying when it went down in the early first century BC, and every return to the site from Cousteau to the atmospheric diving suit
    3. Vol 3 Antikythera — Volume 3 — A Century of Looking — From Stais to Price The gear wheel noticed in 1902, the astrolabe theory, a philologist's unpublished notebook that got it right, a naval officer's model, and the Yale historian of science, the epigrapher and the radiographer whose work became Gears from the Greeks
    4. Vol 4 Antikythera — Volume 4 — Seeing Inside — Wright, Bromley and the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project How a Sydney computer scientist and a London curator brought one plane at a time into focus, how a 450-kilovolt CT scanner and a rig of flash lamps came to the museum in Athens in 2005, and what the Nature papers of 2006 and 2008 found inside the bronze
    5. Vol 5 Antikythera — Volume 5 — The Sky in Numbers — Babylonian Cycles and Greek Geometry Four kinds of month, two great coincidences of whole numbers, and the Greek circles that explained why the Moon speeds up: the astronomy the mechanism was built to compute
    6. Vol 6 Antikythera — Volume 6 — Gears from the Greeks — The Gear Train From a lost crank to five back-dial pointers and a Moon that speeds up and slows down: every surviving tooth count, every ratio worked out, and what the CT scans changed
    7. Vol 7 Antikythera — Volume 7 — The Front Face — Zodiac, Calendar, Sun and Moon Two concentric rings, a star calendar above and below, a Sun pointer, a Moon pointer carrying a half-silvered ball, and a pin in a slot 1.1 millimetres off-centre: what the user saw on the front, and how much of it is known
    8. Vol 8 Antikythera — Volume 8 — The Back Face — Spirals for Calendars, Games and Eclipses A five-turn spiral of 235 Corinthian months, a four-year dial of athletic festivals, a four-turn spiral of eclipse warnings, and the small dials that complete them: what the back of the mechanism said, and how it was read
    9. Vol 9 Antikythera — Volume 9 — The Words on the Machine — Inscriptions and a User's Manual Letters a millimetre high on bronze plates, read backwards from crusts of corrosion and sliced out of the fragments by X-rays: the cover texts, the star calendar, the dial labels, what the 2016 edition found, and what the lettering can and cannot say about date
    10. Vol 10 Antikythera — Volume 10 — The Lost Planets — Reconstructing the Cosmos Display No planetary gear survives, yet the inscriptions demand five planets in order and two numbers demand accurate cycles: the reconstructions from Rehm's notebook to Wright's brass model, Evans, Carman and Thorndike, Freeth and Jones, and the 2021 UCL Model of the Cosmos — and why it is a model, not a replica
    11. Vol 11 Antikythera — Volume 11 — Who, Where, When — and Did It Ever Work? Lettering, eclipse epochs and a rival day zero; Corinthian months, games at Dodona and Rhodes and a star calendar observed near 35° north; Archimedes, Hipparchus, Posidonius and the spheres Cicero described; and the 2025 simulation that asks whether the gears could ever have turned
    12. Vol 12 Antikythera — Volume 12 — A Thousand Years of Silence — From Byzantium to the Astronomical Clock Odometers in Vitruvius and Heron, a Byzantine pocket sundial with a calendar gear train, al-Bīrūnī's geared Moon box and an astrolabe from Isfahan, Su Song's water-driven clock tower, Richard of Wallingford's clock and Giovanni de' Dondi's astrarium — why the tradition went quiet, and where the mechanism stands in the history of analog computing
    13. Vol 13 Antikythera — Volume 13 — Rebuilding It — Replicas from Price to Clickspring A century of brass, Perspex, Lego, watch movements and laser-cut plastic: what each rebuilding of the mechanism was trying to prove, and what it got right
    14. Vol 14 Antikythera — Volume 14 — The Open Antikythera — S&T GeoTronics' Kit Clear acrylic, laser-cut acetal and hand-turned brass: the third Kickstarter from the makers of the Open Enigma and the Open DSKY, what it shows, how it was made, and which reconstruction it resembles
    15. Vol 15 Antikythera — Volume 15 — My Open Antikythera — Building It and Learning to Read It A FullMonty in clear acrylic, a reader's guide to what its needles and spirals say, eclipses to crank towards, and the brass build to come