The search engine celebrates the discovery, in 1901, of the mysterious Antikythera machine.
Google celebrates the first calculator in history.
GEARS . In 1900 divers brought up vases, statues, jewelry and pottery from a wreck dated 65 BC. JC, stranded off the Greek island of Antikythera. In the middle of this treasure, a piece of wood and corroded bronze goes almost unnoticed. It was not until 1902 that an archaeologist noticed the cogwheels of this strange mechanism... Today's Doodle posted on the Google search engine page pays homage to it.
Main fragment of the Antikythera machine. The mechanism consists of a complex system of 32 wheels and plates bearing inscriptions relating to the signs of the zodiac and the months. Credit:Marsyas.
A complex machine
It was then necessary to wait until the beginning of the 70s for the British researcher Derek de Solla Price and the Greek physicist Charalampos Karakalos to pass the mechanism to X-rays and provide a first detailed view of the gears which prove to be particularly complex and amaze the scientists. Another British researcher, Michael Wright, devoted much of his time to understanding and reconstructing the machine which turned out to be a calculator no doubt designed to predict the date of eclipses and the movements of the Moon and Sun.
KINSHIP. Dated between 150 and 100 BC. JC, we do not know the identity of its builders. Some have mentioned an achievement by Archimedes, others see it as the work of the disciples of Hipparchus, the inventor of trigonometry, while science fiction authors attribute it to extraterrestrials, as Christophe Bec does in the Prometheus series. But this question will probably never be answered, the most surprising being that no similar machine was built for centuries, until the first astronomical clocks in the 14th century in Europe.