HISTORY
Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant
I
magine if Howard Carter had opened Tutankhamen’s tomb
and found an internal combustion engine inside. That’s the
sort of surprise scholars received when they realised what had
been hauled up from a Mediterranean shipwreck in 1901 and
left in a cigar box in the storeroom of a Greek museum.
Amongst the treasures of one of the richest hauls of ancient
Greek statues ever found was what appeared to be a corroded
lump of bronze. It turned out to be an intricately constructed
mechanical device, an analogue computer, the world’s oldest
surviving machine.
The Antikythera mechanism, as it became known, was more
than 2000 years old. As New Scientist‘s own Jo Marchant exp-
lains in Decoding the Heavens, it would be at least 1000 years
before anything of similar complexity came along.
Who could have built such a machine? What was it for? Why
has the technology lost? Far from being a hunk of junk, this was
the most important artefact yet found from ancient Greece.
Marchant answers these questions, and blends the story of the
Antikythera mechanism, the people bewitched by it, the 100-
year race to understand it, with the history, chemistry, archaeo-
logy, astronomy, engineering behind it. The account is sprinkled
with the magic dust of an Indiana Jones adventure.Many of the
characters we meet along the way, Marchant tells us, are infec-
ted with the Antikythera bug, and it’s clear that she has been
too.
Arthur C Clarke – who endorsed this book before he died – was
an early victim of the Antikythera bug. Clarke bemoaned the fact
that its secrets had been lost. If only they hadn’t, he said, the
Industrial Revolution might have started more than 1000 years
ago. By now, he said, “We would not merely be pottering around
on the Moon. We would have reached the nearer stars.
The first Apple computer
T
he two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club to-
gether; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in Califor-
nia’s Menlo Park from 1975. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair
there - which today looks like little more than a box of lights
and circuit boards - and was inspired by MITS’ build-it-yourself
approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler
for the rest of us. This philosophy continues to shine through in
Apple’s products today.
So Woz produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like
keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen.
Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every mo-
dern computer, but Wozniak wasn’t trying