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Was the Antikythera Mechanism really recovered in just a year?
So I was down a rabbit hole reading about the Antikythera wreck, and the timeline for the mechanism's recovery feels off to me. Most sources say divers found it in 1901 during the first expedition, but they pulled up a ton of stuff over months, not days. I've been trying to track down exactly when they realized that corroded bronze lump was a geared device, and it looks like it took them like 8 months to even clean it enough to spot the gears. But then some papers say it was actually identified sooner, just not publicized. Am I reading this wrong, or is the 'sudden discovery' story a myth? Has anyone here dug into the actual logbooks from that dive season?
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wyatt_mitchell2618d agoMost Upvoted
Nah that's totally backwards, the gears were spotted within days of the clean.
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iris92718d ago
Your point about the cleaning timeline is spot on. I've looked into this too and found that the "sudden discovery" story gets repeated a lot but the real recovery logs show it was a slow, messy process. They dragged up that bronze lump in October 1901, but it wasn't until June 1902 that someone noticed the gears during cleaning. What makes you think the 8 month gap is significant here? Do you think the divers or archaeologists back then knew it was something special right away but kept quiet for some reason?
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