The Antikythera Mechanism has been reconstructed...and it works!?

good news! I don't feel QUITE so stupid having written a story about clocks being developed in 1st century AD Korea.

somewhere there should be record of the number of man-hours it took to research and build the Antikythera Mechanism. Its a tribute to amateurs, who as any lapidary knows, do all the nice work.

The Antikythera mechanism (IPA: [ˌæntɪkɪˈθɪərə], an-ti-ki-theer-uh), is an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first known mechanical computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, in 1901. Subsequent investigation, particularly in 2006, dated it to about 150–100 BC; and hypothesised that it was on board a ship that sank en route from the Greek island of Rhodes to Rome. Technological artifacts of similar complexity did not reappear until a thousand years later.

I'm not sure any real drawings have been released yet. All I have seen are pictures of what was recovered. It's almost scary that such a work could have existed so long ago.

I would say the article misrepresented wright calling him an amateur. (so far there are no Greek computer rebuilding professionals except for him as of now.... he is salted with numerous achievements if you ask me.

I remember watching a tv show about the pieces they found underwater. much of it was intact (within the fragment recovered) from what I saw

http://www.nmc.org/news/members/michael-wright-exh...

He (Wright) and his work have been featured in Wired, Micro Publishing News, Computer Graphics & Applications and Agent X, Television Tokyo. Wright's digital prints are in the collection of the State Museum in Novorsibirsk, Russia and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London UK, the repository for British art book & print collections.

Wright is a professor in the Digital Media and Liberal Studies Programs at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He is a member of SIGGRAPH, Ylem, ASCI, ACM, NMC, and the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. He is the recipient of the Otis Award of Excellence in Arts Education and served as Art Gallery Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 in San Diego California. He was a guest artist at the SIGGRAPH 2004 & 2005 conferences in Los Angeles where he created the “Portrait Virus” at the SIGGRAPH Guerilla Studio. Wright was one of six resident artists invited to SIGGRAPH’S first Artists in Residence Program at SIGGRAPH 2007, in San Diego. Wright as also curated into the SIGGRAPH international exhibition “Global Eyes” 2007. Wright exhibited work this past summer as part of “Digital Art.LA International New Media Expo” at the Los Angeles Center For Digital Art in Downtown Los Angeles curated by Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art, L.A. County Museum of Art.

Very cool. Didn't Carl Sagan mention that in Cosmos?