17-MAY-1902 :- Archaeologist Valerios Stais discovers the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical analog computer.

The Antikythera mechanism was discovered in 45 metres (148 ft) of water in the Antikythera shipwreck off Point Glyphadia on the Greek island of Antikythera. The wreck was found in April 1900 by a group of Greek sponge divers, who retrieved numerous artifacts, including bronze and marble statues, pottery, unique glassware, jewelery, coins, and the mechanism. All were transferred to the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens for storage and analysis. Merely a lump of corroded bronze and wood at the time, the mechanism went unnoticed for two years while museum staff worked on piecing together more obvious statues.

On 17 May 1902, archaeologist Valerios Stais was examining the finds and noticed that one of the pieces of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Stais initially believed it was an astronomical clock, but most scholars considered the device to be prochronistic, too complex to have been constructed during the same period as the other pieces that had been discovered. Investigations into the object were soon dropped until Derek J. de Solla Price became interested in it in 1951. In 1971, both Price and a Greek nuclear physicist named Charalampos Karakalos made X-ray and gamma-ray images of the 82 fragments. Price published an extensive 70-page paper on their findings in 1974.

It is not known how the mechanism came to be on the cargo ship, but it has been suggested that it was being taken to Rome, together with other treasure looted from the island, to support a triumphal parade being staged by Julius Caesar.

The Antikythera mechanism 

 designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendrical and astrological purposes, as well as the Olympiads, the cycles of the ancient Olympic Games.

Found housed in a 340 × 180 × 90 mm wooden box, the device is a complex clockwork mechanism composed of at least 30 meshing bronze gears. Its remains were found as 82 separate fragments, of which only seven contain any gears or significant inscriptions. The largest gear (clearly visible in Fragment A at right) is approximately 140 mm in diameter and originally had 223 teeth.

The artifact was recovered in 1900–1901 from the Antikythera shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. Believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists, the instrument has been dated either between 150 and 100 BCE or according to a more recent view, at 205 BCE.

After the knowledge of this technology was lost at some point in Antiquity, technological artifacts approaching its complexity and workmanship did not appear again in Europe until the development of mechanical astronomical clocks in the fourteenth century.

All known fragments of the Antikythera mechanism are kept at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.