by Decoding the Heavens- Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer (retail) (epub)
Then, just before Christmas 1989 Bromley swept into Wright’s office bearing a triumphant air not dissimilar to the one that Judith Field had worn when she brought him the Byzantine sundial six years earlier.
‘I’ve just come from Athens!’ he announced grandly. ‘The museum has given me permission to work on the Antikythera mechanism!’
Wright’s jaw dropped. All this time he had been dreaming about studying the mechanism and now Bromley – his friend, the man he had confided in – had stolen his idea. There was an unwritten rule with Greek antiquities that when access to an artefact was granted to one researcher it was withheld from all others until that person had published their results. Wright had been shut out. Not for the first time he felt sorely jealous of these university academics who got to swan around from institute to institute studying whatever they chose. He knew his stuff, and he was better equipped to tackle the Antikythera mechanism than this man was. If only he could get the chance to prove it.
Bromley was heading back to Athens to examine the fragments in just a few weeks’ time and Wright realised there was only one way that he could get there, too. He swallowed his pride and asked Bromley to take him along as his assistant.
Bromley agreed, so Wright, who had never organised a foreign trip in his life, collected his thoughts and his papers and booked some time off. The two of them flew to Athens in January, arriving late on a Sunday night – Bromley stayed in a comfy B&B across town from the museum, while Wright managed to snatch a last-minute bed at a nearby student hostel.
The next morning the pair met at the museum, where they were greeted by Petros Kalligas, seasoned curator of the museum’s bronze collection, who had worked with Price and Karakalos back in the 1970s. He was a charming old man and spoke excellent English, which came as a relief to Wright, who hadn’t realised until he arrived in Athens that modern Greek was somewhat different to the ancient language he had learned at school.
After treating the pair to a shot of stiff black coffee, Kalligas led them to a table in the corner of the bronze conservation workshop, surrounded by pieces of old statues. On the table, lying on sheets of tissue paper in a tray, were the Antikythera fragments.
Wright’s first thought was how small they were – photos hadn’t prepared him for how tiny the instrument was, each piece dense with intricate detail. His second, jubilant, thought was: ‘Price didn’t notice half of this!’ Eagerly, he pulled on his white cotton gloves – standard issue for museum curators when handling delicate artefacts – but Kalligas gently stopped him. ‘We find that much less of the material rubs off on bare skin,’ he said. And he left them to it.
Wright and Bromley spent the next month carefully measuring, photographing and noting down every detail of the fragments and checking their observations against those recorded by Price. They worked every day until the museum staff ushered them out in mid-afternoon. Then there was food and some light relief, wandering the sights of Athens or settling in to one of the many little backstreet bars, where they drank home-made wine from tin jugs and ate mezedes from a tray as they discussed the finds of the day. After that it was generally back to work, but sometimes they’d move from wine to ouzo as the afternoon turned to evening and then the early hours of the morning. A particular favourite was To Gerani (The Geranium), a down-at-heel drinking den on Tripod Street.
One day early in their stay Bromley was unwell after a particularly lively night out. Wright, who had stayed in, went to the museum alone, watched over only by a bored-looking assistant called Tassos and a few buzzing flies. The pieces looked like green, flaky pastry, he thought, and felt like it too, only a bit heavier. He touched them as lightly as possible to minimise the amount of dust that crumbled away at the slightest contact with his fingers. These fragments had survived so long, through the vicissitudes of 2,000 years of history, yet they were now so fragile. Every tiny piece might contain some vital piece of information that if he wasn’t careful could be lost forever. One of the fragments consisted of a round, corroded mass with a thinner, curved piece of the zodiac scale sticking out to one side. He turned it over to see what was on the back, but as he did so, he heard a sickening click and the scale broke into two before his eyes.
Wright was distraught. He had been looking forward to this opportunity for years and now he was finally able to study the fragments for himself he had broken one of them! Surely he would be banished from the museum forever for his clumsiness. He rushed past Tassos, out of the door and down the corridor into Dr Kalligas’s office.
‘There’s been an accident,’ he said, his voice shaking. The curator looked up from his papers. ‘An accident? What sort of accident?’
‘One of the pieces has . . . has . . .’ He forced out the word. ‘Broken.’ ‘Hmph!’ said Kalligas. He strode out of his office and into the workroom, Wright following nervously behind. He examined the broken pieces. ‘Hmph!’ he said again. Then he was silent for a few moments, until, finally, he spoke.
‘It happens,’ he said. ‘It happens to everyone. It happens to Tassos. It even happens to me. Now it has happened to you. Go home, have a drink, get some sleep. Then come back tomorrow.’
The next day, Wright returned with Bromley to survey the damage. It wasn’t surprising that the fragment had broken. Inside, there was hardly any metal left – just a tiny sliver of pink remained within the flaky green. The two of them got a couple of photos of the break. Then Tassos stuck the pieces back together with superglue.
As Wright and Bromley’s work progressed, it became clear that as well as missing a lot of the detail, Price had been mistaken in several important respects. For example, the fragments didn’t fit together as Price had said they did. His positioning of fragment D – the lonely cogwheel – in a back corner had been a key part of his reconstruction of the gear train leading to the upper back dial. Without it there was no evidence whatsoever for Price’s idea that it had been a four-year dial. Several other gearwheels, too, were not where Price had put them in his reconstruction. They would have to throw out much of his model and start again.
There was also a new piece of the mechanism – called fragment E – which Kalligas had found in a back room in 1976, too late for Price’s study. It was just a few centimetres across and formed part of the lower back dial, which Price had thought displayed the phase of the Moon, as calculated by the differential gear.
After photographing the fragments and noting down every visible detail, Wright and Bromley moved on to radiography. There was an X-ray machine in the lab of the museum’s scientist, a bright, matronly woman called Eleni Magkou. Charalambos Karakalos still guarded his images jealously, so they decided to X-ray every piece of the mechanism again. Magkou left it to one of her technicians, Giorgos, to do the work. But the results were puzzling: the films were coming back fogged and with a distinctly yellow tint.
Their time up, the pair left Athens disappointed with their X-ray images and grappling with the same problem that had stumped Price. With so many layers of gearwheels all appearing on top of each other, it was impossible to tell how the mechanism was arranged. To get any further they would need to separate out the different depths.
Soon after they returned to London, Bromley gave a lecture on the Antikythera mechanism to the Antiquarian Horology Society. It annoyed Wright, because Bromley kept referring to the project as if it were solely his, but one useful thing came out of it. A member of the audience called Alan Partridge came up to them afterwards. He was a Meccano enthusiast (he had a room at home full of the stuff) and like Bromley he had used it to model Price’s reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism. Partridge was a retired doctor and he suggested that they build a crude linear tomography machine. He had worked in hospitals in poor countries such as Nigeria, so he knew how to do things low-tech.
Linear tomography was first developed in the 1920s and was used during the Second World War to locate bullets and shrapnel in the bodies of wounded soldiers. You lie the patient on a couch, the X-ray source on
one side and the film on the other. During the exposure you keep the patient still, while you slide the source and the film together, so that only one plane within the patient stays in focus, while all the others blur. By adjusting the distance between the source, the patient and the film, you can take a series of images, each with a different plane in focus, like imaging a series of slices through the patient’s body.
Wright decided to build the necessary equipment in his workshop at home. The X-ray source at the Athens museum was going to be too large and heavy to move around. But he could get the same effect another way. He constructed a cradle from aluminium castings and plywood that would hold the fragment and the film at a set distance apart. Once fixed inside they could both be swung together, while the X-ray source stayed still, giving the same effect as conventional tomography.
As well as building the cradle, he read up on the theory of tomography, spending his evenings studying tables of exposure times. And he made a fake fragment to test out his skills by pouring casting resin over some old cogwheels and metal plates from his scrap box so that they set in a lump. The equipment worked beautifully and the resulting images allowed him to separate out depths of less than a tenth of a millimetre, surely enough to resolve even the tiniest detail inside the Antikythera mechanism.
The next winter the pair returned to Athens with Wright’s tomography cradle packed in a suitcase, and armed with boxes and boxes of X-ray film donated by a kind gentleman at Agfa. But before they could start on their tomography, they had to work out why the quality of the X-ray images had been so poor.
Eventually they realised that Magkou’s lab had no money to pay for developing chemicals. So rather than make up his own, Giorgos, the technician, would wait until the museum’s unsuspecting photographer went on his lunch break, then use his developing baths. The silver grains from the X-ray film must have played havoc with the poor man’s photos. Bromley soon sweet-talked Sydney University into providing some extra funds and picked up the necessary supplies, much to the astonishment of Eleni Magkou. Bromley had spent more on chemicals than her entire consumables budget for the year.
The images were better, but still not right. Then Wright got permission to ‘help’ Giorgos in the darkroom and it soon became clear that his attitude was relaxed, to say the least. He didn’t believe in watches and would develop his plates according to the time it took him to smoke a cigarette; its end glowing orange in the other wise inky black darkroom. Luckily he was only too pleased to wait outside while Wright took over.
With the technical difficulties solved, they worked every moment they could with Bromley taking the exposures and Wright doing the delicate job of developing the plates – spending hours on end in the darkness before emerging blinking into the bright Athens sunlight. Then a smiling Bromley would drag him off to the nearest bar for a glass or three of retsina.
They continued with this routine every winter, Bromley coming during his university’s summer vacation and Wright using his precious holiday time. Finally, three years and more than 700 exposures later, they were done. It was February 1994. Wright was confident that he might be limited by the sorry state of the fragments, but not by the quality of the radiography. Within their piles of images he knew that the answer to the Antikythera mystery – if there was an answer – lay waiting to be discovered.
Then Bromley dropped a bombshell. He thanked Wright for his work, but announced that as the lead partner on the research project, he would be taking all of the radiographs back to Sydney. The best way to study the images was to scan them into a computer and he had a student who was waiting to get started.
Wright, once again, was horrified by the behaviour of the man he had thought was his friend. This was not fair play. For the last five years he had spent every spare moment thinking, planning, preparing for his work on the Antikythera mechanism. He had built his own equipment, learned new skills and patiently coaxed details out of the stubborn fragments that no one else could have hoped to glean. Now Bromley was waltzing off to the other side of the world with his precious images.
But Wright was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to argue. He hated confrontation and felt he had no chance of winning against the forceful, supremely confident Bromley. Wright had given the project everything he had. He flew back home with nothing.
7
Mechanic’s Workshop
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.
— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (I. 3)
BING! THE LIGHT above Wright’s seat instructed him to fasten his seatbelt for arrival in Sydney. His mind chased in uneasy circles, and he felt slightly sick. A stewardess was looking at him and speaking; with some effort he tuned in to discover that she was asking whether he’d had a pleasant flight. As ever, he gave an honest answer.
‘You did your best,’ he said. ‘But I’m terrified at what I’m going to find when we land.’
The years following Wright’s last trip to Athens with Bromley had been – not to put too fine a point on it – bleak. The pressures of work and life had taken their toll. He was separated from his wife and children and living in lodgings; separated from his workshop, too, with his tools mostly in storage (although his landlord had been kind enough to let him put his lathe in the skullery). And at the Science Museum his bosses were pushing him to take time off to deal with his depression, a move which he was convinced was all part of a plan to sack him.
Then, just as he had begun to set up home on his own, he fell while decorating the bathroom and punched his hand through the china lavatory, cutting through blood vessels, tendons and a nerve at the wrist. He was told he would never use the hand again – a devastating prognosis, which fortunately turned out to be inaccurate. Nevertheless, it took months of therapy to learn how to cope with the crippling loss of sensation and awkward movement he was left with, and years to regain confidence in the use of his hand.
Meanwhile, any correspondence from Bromley had dried up. Wright had never seen his precious images again, and Bromley’s promise to digitise the radiographs came to nothing. At first, Bromley had sent him odd snippets of information to see what he made of them, as if deliberately teasing him, but then months went by and Wright heard nothing.
So much of human life is wasted doing pointless things, he thought. So much of what we do is futile. For the last ten years of his life solving the Antikythera mechanism had been the one thing that seemed worth doing; his one chance to make an important and lasting addition to human knowledge. There were a lot of things he wasn’t good at – just looking around at his life at the time made that perfectly clear. But this was the one challenge in which he had the skills needed to succeed where no one else could. Without the Antikythera mechanism, Wright wasn’t sure what he was doing on the planet at all.
He kept mulling over a detail that he had seen in Athens – a fundamental problem at the heart of Price’s reconstruction, casting his whole model in doubt. Price had interpreted a train of gears leading from the main drive wheel back to a wheel centred around the same point as encoding the Metonic 19-year cycle – this was the part that converted the once-yearly motion of the main wheel into the speed of the Moon around the zodiac. The two motions ended up going in opposite directions, then both fed into the differential gear. By subtracting one from another, the differential gear supposedly calculated the phase of the Moon.
Wright had seen that there was an extra wheel at the end of this train, which Price had missed. It had the same number of teeth as the one before, so the rate of rotation of the lunar pointer wasn’t changed. But the direction of the motion was. This made sense, because the train could then drive the Sun and Moon pointers in the same direction around the zodiac dial. (Price had been forced to imagine another big wheel the same size as the main drive wheel, driven by the other sid
e of the crown wheel and thus in the opposite direction, to drive the Sun pointer.) But it caused a huge problem further down the line. If the rotations of the Sun and Moon were fed into the differential gear going in the same direction, then they wouldn’t be subtracted, they would be added. And adding the Sun to the Moon makes no sense at all. Something was very wrong.
But without his radiographs Wright was left with nothing but questions and no way to answer them. He cursed Bromley for his betrayal and he cursed himself for not being stronger and standing up to him.
Wright had no way of knowing that on the other side of the world the research project was not going as Bromley had hoped. In fact, Bromley was desperately trying to hide from Wright – and everyone around him – that he was ill and increasingly unable to work. Then, as the end of the century approached, Wright received a letter from Bromley’s wife explaining that her husband had been suffering for years from a form of cancer called Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that he was deteriorating fast. If you want to see him, she wrote, you have to come soon.
Wright was desperate to retrieve his radiographs, but he felt he couldn’t go unless Bromley asked him. He was frustrated with Bromley, had even hated him at times, but to visit uninvited would be like saying to his friend that he knew he was going to die. Bromley finally wrote to Wright in 2000 telling him that he had been given just six months to live. That was enough. In November, Wright summoned up his courage and flew to Sydney.
He turned up on Bromley’s doorstep exhausted and nervous; it was nearly six years since they had last seen each other. But when his friend opened the door, Wright’s fear turned to shock. Bromley was barely recognisable. Wright was used to seeing him full of energy and the centre of attention, seemingly capable of achieving anything and of persuading others to come along for the ride. Now his beard and smile were gone and his round, bonny face had become chalky-white, the skin drawn tight over bone.
