The Antikythera mechanism (2 century BC) basically reset what we believed of science, mechanics and mathematical knowledge during antiquity. That, and some other things : Hero's Eolipyle, Nero's emerald monocle, Provence "industrial" mills... They had the ability, they lacked the will.
They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.
There's a strange parallel to the evolution of life on Earth. Took about a billion years before the simplest single-celled organism developed all the basic mechanisms/components, and then a few hundred million years from complex multicelled organisms, and finally a huge explosion in diversity in the last hundred million years. I wonder if evolution and technological progress plotted on the same relative logarithmic scale would overlay each other?
