Hublot Antikythera mechanism,100-year-old clockwork relic

It's a story of gigantic scientific upheaval, of adventure and shipwreck on the high seas, of war and death.

A story of amazing intellect, lost riches and impossible chance - a sunken treasure that Jaques Cousteau once described as "more valuable than the Mona Lisa" - and it's connected with an ancient celebrity whose star shone so brightly that he's still a household name more than 2200 years after his death.

There are few scientific or historic discoveries more significant than the one made by a Greek sponge diver in October 1900, on the Mediterranean sea bed.

Captain Kondos sent a team down to see if they might be able to pick up any more sponges while they waited for the storm to pass.

Within a short time, diver Elias Stadiatos resurfaced, raving like a lunatic. He reported finding a shipwreck on the sea bed 60 meters (197 feet) below, with hundreds of corpses and horses strewn about, in various stages of decay.

Far from a stack of corpses, what Kondos found made his sponge gathering mission pale in comparison.

A sunken ancient vessel, loaded with all kinds of loot and treasure. What Stadiatos had reported as rotting bodies were actually bronze statues that had been covered over by centuries' worth of sea floor debris.

The team scavenged what they could carry and took it back to Greece, where the Greek Education Ministry and Hellenic Navy quickly put together an expedition to explore the wreck more thoroughly.

Early indications were that the material on board dated back more than 2,000 years, into the fascinating historical period of the Roman Republic.

The collection itself was a celebrated find, but one anonymous chunk of rock sitting in a storage room had further riches to offer, when it broke apart and a caretaker noticed metallic gears within.

The Antikythera mechanism
Historians at the time largely ignored the device for one simple reason - the technology required to make such complex metallic gear systems simply didn't exist back in 100 B.C.

It appeared to have an epicyclic, or planetary gear system in it - and those hadn't popped up anywhere else in history for another 1900 years or so.

It was assumed that the machine had been misplaced, accidentally left with the wreckage, or wrongly catalouged, so it was shelved for another 49 years, until an English physicist called Derek Price decided to have a closer look in 1951.

With better technology and plenty of time at hand, Price soon realized that this was indeed an ancient device - in fact, there was some kind of instructive script carved into it, faded almost to obscurity, that put it right in the 100-300 B.C. period. This was a true Eureka moment - it put amazingly advanced technology in the hands of the Ancient Greeks.

In fact, it instantly became not only the world's earliest known use of planetary gears, but the first known mechanism that used clockwork gears at all. Various civilizations earlier than the Ancient Greeks had used wooden peg-in-hole gear systems to transfer motion, but this was an order of magnitude more complex than anything before it, and indeed anything for a millennium and a half after it.

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