A hundred years ago, sponge divers off the coast of Greece found, amidst the wreckage of an ancient ship, "a shoebox-size lump of bronze, which appeared to have a wooden exterior. Inside... [was] what looked like a bronze dial. Researchers also noticed precisely cut triangular gear teeth of different sizes. The thing looked like some sort of mechanical clock. But this was impossible, because scientifically precise gearing wasn't believed to have been widely used until the fourteenth century — fourteen hundred years after the ship went down."
It look a century -- and all kinds of next-generation CAT scans. But finally, researchers have unraveled the mystery of the "Antikythera Mechanism."
It turns out that the ancient Greeks were more clever than we ever dreamed. (And we dreamed they were pretty clever.) The artifact does indeed have the an amazingly precise gear train. And it's used to power what the New Yorker is calling "the world's first computer."
I don't want to give too much of the story away. Just go over and give it a read. When you're done, start clicking around here and here.
