I’ll post about NY tonight, but I just wanted to link to this real fast. Appearently, a diver in 1900 found the wreck of a cargo ship off the Greek island of Antikythera. The cargo dates to the first century BCE, and contains a complex mechanical device.

“The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now known, was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and a complex assembly of bronze gear wheels within.”

This device is now believed to be an astronomic tracker, which allowed the user to predict the location of the Sun and at least three planets for a given date, with reasonable accuracy (considering the state of astronomy at the time).