Below is a different review of the same book, which I wrote for 'Antiquarian Horology':
JO MARCHANT,Decoding the Heavens :
A 2,000-Year-Old Computer and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, published by Da Capo Press, Cambridge MA, 2009, hardcover. Also available in a UK edition as Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer. Or borrow from the NAWCC Library in Columbia (Members only)
Most students of the history of timekeeping machinery will have come across various pieces of information on the Antikythera mechanism in their reading and recall the outline account of its discovery. In the fall of the year 1900, the Greek Captain Dimitros Kontos and his crew of sponge divers stumbled upon a shipwreck from antiquity off the island of Antikythera, and thereby started the science of underwater archeology. In addition to a large number of statues and other artifacts, one recovered item was completely different. It consisted of several fragments of a very complex, geared, bronze mechanism with mysterious inscriptions. Whatever that object was, it was destined to substantially rewrite the history of technology.
The book under review is an up-to-date, detailed retelling of the story of this mechanism, its discovery, its interpretation and the search for its function. The author incorporates the discoveries and new theories that have been developed about the Antikythera mechanism during the last several years.
Michael Wright, formerly of the London Science Museum, has constructed a new replica and published his findings in this magazine and elsewhere. Regular readers of Antiquarian Horology are probably familiar with his three major articles on the subject in 2003 (Vol. 27, pp. 270-279), 2005 (Vol.29, pp. 51-63) and 2006 (Vol.29, pp. 319-329), titled `Epicyclic gearing and the Antikythera Mechanism, Part I & II' and `The Antikythera Mechanism and the Early History of the Moon-Phase Display'. Completely independently, British scholars Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth have also become obsessed with decoding the mechanism, just like Derek de Solla Price of Princeton University did half a century earlier. And -most importantly- a Greek based multidisciplinary research team agreed to analyze the object in detail using newly developed, state-of-the art American high energy X-ray technology, which allowed for the first time to examine the inside of the object in amazing detail, yielding new teeth counts and additional ancient inscriptions. Much of this research is ongoing, and every few months additional inscriptions are deciphered, new papers are published, and new physical models are built or existing ones are modified.
This book is not a scholarly treatment of the subject matter. The author is not a scientist publishing new scholarly insights, but a journalist telling a compelling story. In many ways this book reminded this reviewer of Dava Sobel's bestseller Longitude; there, as well, the focus was not primarily on the technical specifics of the physical artifact, but on the `human interest story' behind the object, the story of the struggles of Harrison and Gould. Here, too, the author writes an eminently readable account of the numerous twists and dead ends which various scientists have encountered in researching the functionality of the mechanism. She focuses on the passions and personalities of the scholars, as much as she does on the intricacies of the mechanism, which - as it turns out- is not a `timekeeper' in the narrower sense of the word, but a sophisticated `time calculator', specifically a planetary calculator. `Planets' is here used in Ptolemy's sense, i.e. including sun and moon, and the machine apparently uses epicyclic gearing, the 19 year metonic cycle, and a spiral display.
The main characters in the book are scholars like De Solla Price, Bromley, Wright, Edmunds and Freeth, and a large supporting cast of Greek museum officials, archeologists, philologists and "cryptographers". These people all become alive in the book, as a captivating story of discovery is told, with side plots involving rivalries, egos and national pride. This is a book about both the 'process' of decoding the mechanism and the egos of the key players, rather than a detailed account of the mechanism itself. This reviewer found the book fascinating and informative, mainly due to the fact that virtually everything else that has been published on the history of technology typically covers the objects themselves, and ignores the process of scholarship and the personalities involved.
The book has triggered a wave of criticism from various scholars involved in the recent discoveries. A recent Greek translation of the book contains 84 corrective footnotes; for a list see the Research Project's webpage [...] where a pdf can be downloaded regarding so-called `errors' in Merchant's text. Many of these seem to concern different interpretation of data, or points of Greek national pride. To this reviewer this latest controversy just reinforces one of the key themes of the book: there is hardly a historic object in the history of technology which has triggered as many passions as the Antikythera mechanism.
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