Derek Price, King of the Autodidacts

[Derek de Solla Price] was born in 1922 to Philip Price, a tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. The couple didn’t have many material possessions, but they had enough money to indulge their young son in his love of Meccano, which was all the rage at the time. With enough ingenuity, the red and green painted girders, pulleys and cogs could be built into pretty much anything a boy could imagine—a bridge, a crane, a car, a spaceship—and Price wasn’t short of either ingenuity or imagination. The toy instilled in him a passion for mechanics and for how things work, which stayed with him for life….

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Despite his talent, Price didn’t have the money or the background to go to university, so he followed a less conventional route to pursuing the subjects that he loved. He got a job as a lab assistant at the newly opened South West Essex Technical College, which enabled him to study part-time for a degree at the University of London. The physics equipment there was one glorious step up from Meccano. Square and black with clunky dials and flickering green screens, the oscilloscopes, voltmeters and spectrometers were as heavy as stones, and packed full to bursting with valves and wiring. With such instruments you could make sense of things; you could measure the whole world! Price spend hours taking these devices apart, tinkering with them and putting them back together, until his fingers and his heart were intimately familiar with their workings.

He got his degree in physics and maths in 1942 and the college—seriously short-staffed because of the war—instantly promoted him to lecturer. He worked in one classroom often for eight hours straight, learning the curriculum as he taught it. He also carried out research for the military on the optics of molten metals, and the University of London awarded him a PhD for it in 1946. Once the war ended, however, there was no job for him in London… He accepted a teaching position at the young Raffles College in Singapore….

Singapore was wonderful and exotic and it inspired in Price a new love for oriental culture and its history. It also introduced him to the history of science. Raffles College acquired a full set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—the journal of Britain’s foremost scientific body, with such worthy members over the centuries as Humphry Davy, Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. The college library was still being built, so Price seized his chance and took the beautiful calf-bound volumes home with him—into ‘protective custody’, he joked. Accustomed by now to teaching himself everything, he used them as bedtime reading, starting with the first volume from 1665 and working his way through.

—Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—and the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets

Price’s reading of the Royal Society papers aroused an interest in the history of science, particularly the history of scientific instruments, especially clockwork and astronomical instruments. When he found out about the Antikythera Mechanism there was only one thing to do: go to Athens!

The Antikythera Wreck and Archaeological Oopses

I’ve posted before about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek clockwork device that could predict the positions of the moon, the sun, and the known planets. It was found in the first shipwreck ever to be explored by archaeologists, located on a thirty metre-deep shelf off the island of Antikythera in the Ionian Sea. For a long time the corroded lump of bronze was overlooked because of the other astonishing treasures found at the site, including large bronze and marble statues that have been displayed in Athens with much pride since their recovery in 1901.

As it was the first ever underwater archaeological expedition, pushing the limits of the diving technology of the time, things weren’t done in as scientific a manner as they would be today. The archaeologists themselves were not divers, so they never saw the artefacts in situ. Not only did they lose all of the contextual information associated with the objects, there were other unfortunate consequences:

Then the divers announced a further problem: part of the wreck, they said, was obscured by enormous boulders. After some discussion the archaeologists worked out that these must be rocks from the cliff above, dislodged at some time by an earthquake, and soon devised a strategy for shifting them.

The instructed the divers to dig tunnels underneath the boulders, then twine strong ropes around them several times, an arduous task that took more than 20 dives for each boulder. The other end of the rope was attached to the sturdy Mykale (brought out again from Athens for the task) which then steamed at full power towards the open sea. Once dislodged from the wreck, the boulders were to be released from the ropes, rolled down the slope and into the depths below.

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But then the minister Staïs, who was visiting, had a startling thought. What if the ‘boulders’ were actually colossal statues, so overgrown and corroded that the [nitrogen narcosis-]befuddled divers, working in the dim light of the wreck site, had failed to recognize them? He ordered the next bolder to be brought to the surface—at considerable further risk to the ship. After some tense moments there was a cheering from the decks as it heaved into view through the clear water. It was a huge, muscular Hercules, complete with club and lionskin—eroded but still recognizable as similar in style to the world-famous Farnese Hercules, kept in the Naples Museum. Presumably, they preferred not to dwell on the statues that had already been rolled forever out of reach.

—Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—and the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets

Oops. The statues were obviously seriously eroded—marble melts in seawater—but it is painful to think of what might have been lost. Though the shipwreck has been revisited since its original discovery, I haven’t found any sign of an attempt to retrieve those lost statues. For now, along with countless other ancient treasures, they remain the property of the sea.