TO THE untrained eye, the first analogue computer wasn’t much to look at. Retrieved from a 1st century BC Greek shipwreck, the Antikythera mechanism resembled “a green, flaky pastry”, albeit one with a filling of gears inscribed with enigmatic lettering. Jo Marchant, a consultant for this magazine, tells a fascinating tale of an artifact that upends our estimation of Classical technology. Ignored, misinterpreted and even fobbed off as “alien technology”, it has taken a century to fully recognise the extraordinary gearwork’s purpose in tracking planetary motion. Amid the hazardous dives that raised it and the lives spent in painstaking research and professional jealousy, Decoding the Heavens conveys the wonder of a find one archaeologist hailed “as spectacular as if the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb had revealed the decayed but recognisable parts of an internal combustion engine”.
Da Capo Press