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92 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
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dicated by artifacts in several places on the ship. It was without
any doubt determined to be the year 83 B.C., and everybody
knew that at that time there were no clocks—or any other device
—made with gears. Neither were mechanical calculators constructed
in ancient Greece.
To tell time, both Greeks and Romans of the last century before
Christ used sun dials, water-dripping clepsydras, or handy
sand hourglasses. Never before had anybody found or read of
gear and dial mechanisms for that purpose. Besides, nobody in
that century was rushed, and, except for astronomers, nobody
seemed much concerned about keeping the exact time. (Night
and day were divided into twelve parts each and only at the
spring and the autumnal equinoxes were the divisions
of equal
length.
Thus the conclusion of the scholars was that the mechanism
found in the galley of Antikythera simply could not have been
made 2,000 years ago. It had to be a clock perhaps 200 or 300
years old, tossed overboard by the captain of a ship passing over
the wreck of the ancient galley. That was an explanation acceptable
to the twentieth-century scientific establishment, and for the
next fifty-six years nobody had the nerve to speak about it again.
To avoid controversy, the find was registered in the museum catalogue
as an astrolabe, and that's where things rested more or
less until 1958, when a young English mathematiciEin, Dr. Derek
de SoUa Price, working at the Princeton Institute of Advanced
J.
Study, obtained a grant to study the Antikythera mechanism and
later published his findings in the scientific magazines Natural
History and Scientific American.
Luckily, the museum technicians had taken good care of the
clock remnants. There were four main pieces, each composed of
many layers of bronze gears and some smaller lumps. Some parts
were missing and probably still on the bottom of the Aegean. As
he studied what was there. Price had the good idea to use radiations
with different intensities and frequencies to photograph
separate layers of the mechanism that could not be taken apart.
These layers were minuscule, about 2 millimeters thick each, and
all together there were as many as thirty different gears. This
method of selective photography also proved that the clock contained
a differential gear—a sensational discovery indicating a