Show Notes
In the spring of nineteen hundred, sponge divers from the island of Symi sheltered from bad weather off a rock between Kythera and Crete, and one of them went down on a rope in canvas and lead and tinned copper, with his air coming down a hose from a hand pump on the deck. He had perhaps ten minutes. What he was standing on was the cargo of an ancient ship — bronze and marble statues, glass, gold, coins — and one corroded lump about the size of a thick book that nobody recognised for the better part of a year, while the beautiful things beside it were cleaned and admired and photographed.
That lump calculates the sky. Turn the handle and the sun and the moon run through the zodiac; a small ball turns to show the moon's phase; a spiral on the back names eclipses years ahead, and says whether each will be of the sun or the moon, and at what hour. One engraved note marks an eclipse that would fall in daylight, and therefore would not be seen at all.
This is the story of that machine and of the people who spent their working lives finding out what it did. A former minister of education, off duty in a museum in May of nineteen hundred and two, fitting two scraps of bronze together until a toothed wheel closed in his hands. A classicist who worked out what it was in a dozen pages, called his own sketch a cooking stove, and never published. A professor who put the word "computer" on a magazine cover in nineteen fifty-nine and got the gears wrong. And a curator who built his own X-ray apparatus because the one he needed did not exist, then built the whole machine again at home, out of materials that lay to hand.
And underneath it, the quiet answer to the thing everyone finds impossible. The teeth were cut by hand and wander by a few per cent. A Roman writer describes such machines as a known kind of object, with a lineage of makers behind them. Bronze was worth money, and the normal end of a bronze object was the melting pot. This one is not a miracle — it is the one that was lost somewhere nobody could reach it with a hammer.
A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nothing here will startle you or wake you. Where the evidence runs out, I say so.
More from Lantern and Ledger
In a parish office in Haggerston, in the first years of the reign, a registrar sat filling in a printed form about the streets where the dying was worst. He wrote down the drainage. He wrote down the water. Then he added a third line nobody had asked him for, standing up for his neighbours — that the people there were generally of cleanly habits, and that what was wrong with their streets was not their doing.
In a farmhouse room on a small island in Nova Scotia, somewhere in the eighteen-nineties, a county historian stood looking at paper silhouettes on a wall — the cut-out profiles people made of one another before photography. One of them was of a woman who had been a servant in the Treasurer's house at Halifax. The man who built that room had been born into slavery in South Carolina, got out during the Revolution, took his owner's surname because it was the name he had, and came north with the Loyalists. His name was Samuel Ball, and no likeness of him has ever existed.
On a summer day in Hertfordshire in sixteen seventy-eight, a poor man who cut grass for a living ran after a farmer along a track beside three half-acres of ripe oats, to offer to do the work for less than he had asked a moment earlier. The farmer refused anyway, and said with a stern look and a hasty gesture that the Devil should mow it rather than he. That night, the pamphlet says, the field showed as if it were all of a flame, and in the morning the oats lay cut in a circle so neatly that no mortal man could do the like.
In eighteen eighty-four, in Baltimore, two men sat at a table with a rebuilt post-office scale and a pack of shuffled playing cards, pressing weights too small to feel onto each other's fingertips. One of them marked almost every answer as a pure guess — and was right two times in three anyway.
On a Sunday afternoon in February of nineteen ninety, a car stopped a quarter of a mile short of a prison gate outside Paarl, and a white-haired man of seventy-one got out with his wife and walked the rest of the way, live on television around the world. Twenty years later, a great many of the people who watched it would say they had already seen his funeral.