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An Ancient Orrery — The Beautiful Mystery of the Antikythera Mechanism
In 1900, sponge divers stopped off the Greek island of Antikythera. They were waiting for favorable winds to cross to their fishing grounds off North Africa.
The bored divers decided to gear up and do practice dives while waiting. Elias Stadiatis went down to 45 meters and then signaled retrieval.
He had found something. He told them he had found bodies. Lots of bodies. They thought he was nitrogen-drunk.
Dimitrios Kondos, the Captain, geared up and went to take a look and quickly realized that Stadiatis was quite sober.
Stadiatis had found an ancient shipwreck. Kondos came up with a single artifact, a bronze arm, to demonstrate the find, marked the location on a chart and they went fishing. On their way back, they did a second dive to get more to show the authorities. Who promptly hired them to finish the job.
The Antikythera shipwreck was excavated through 1901, but efforts stopped after a diver died.
In 1902, Valerios Stais was looking through the hastily-retrieved artifacts (this was 1900, after all) and found something amazing. It was severely-corroded bronze, but it was a gear.
The shipwreck dated from the 1st century AD.