There's plenty of evidence that modern men aren't the only gadget-lovers. Technology was also alive and well in ancient Greece.

Long before Galileo changed the course of history in the 1600s with his astronomical discoveries, ancient Greeks were calculating the circumference of the earth, gauging lunar eclipses, pumping water, making steam engines and even building toy automatons for lack of another purpose in pre-industrial antiquity.

"Greeks had been using technology to carry out engineering feats as far back as 1800 BC," says Theodossios Tassios, president of the Ancient Greek Technology Studies Association and engineering professor at Athens Polytechnic. "The persisting inclination of ancient Greeks for robots and automatons and their veneration of the god of engineering, Hephaistos, proves that these tribes were very, very open to technology," he says.

"Even in Mycenaean times the technological achievements were enormous. Lake Kopais, for instance, the ex-lake drained 100 years ago, was first drained in the second millennium before Christ and this is marvellous to see," says Tassios of the massive hydraulic engineering project.

Technological boom
And then something clicked. "The remarkable thing that happened in the 6th Century BC was the happy wedding between empirical technology and newly generated science," says Tassios. Hoists were used in mining, coins were mechanically minted, instruments were created to observe the world around them as well as the heavens, and (everything for a purpose) massive war machines were built.

Archimedes' (287-212 BC) cranes must have been especially terrifying. Plutarch (45-125 AD), in his Marcellus chapter XV, reports: "The ships were seized by the bows by iron claws or by machines that looked like the mouths of cranes, which forced them down into the depths..."

They even had an armoured vehicle, the elepolis, devised by Polyeides (339 BC), a 40-metre-high contraption that moved on four or eight wheels, and a rapid-firing 'machine-gun' catapult (polyvolon = many + volley) devised by Dionysius of Syracuse (409-354 BC) and used to defeat the Carthagians top in the Punic wars.

Ctesibius of Alexandria (285-222 BC) developed a pneumatic catapult that combined a spring device with a compressed air system to hurl stones at intervals, incorporating a piston - "a mechanism of exceptional technical importance, says Tassios - as well as pumps. The screw pump was improved by Archimedes, "who used it for lifting water, a development that would later be adapted worldwide".

Spiritual technology
Inventors also turned their desire for knowledge outward and upward, as well as for pleasure. Musical instruments were constructed according to Pythagoras' (580-490 BC) numerical scale.

Eratosthenes (240 BC) calculated the earth was round after he realized the suns rays hit the bottom of a well in Aswan (then Syene ) at a different time of day than in Alexandria. Galileo didn't reach a more accurate conclusion for another 1,900 years.

Toothed wheels and computers
Philo of Byzantium (260-180 BC) knew much about metallurgy and gadgets and wrote many books that survive, Pneumatica, Water Clocks, and Toothed Wheels among them. The latter deals with gears - the transmission of power based on the multiplication or division of rotary movement. "This was indeed a great moment in the history of mechanics," says Tassios.

One toothed wheel contraption is the computer-like Antikythera Mechanism. Devised about 80 BC, it is believed to hail from the island of Rodos' Poseidon School. A calendar computer, it had 31 interconnecting precision gears of various sizes, including a differential, that accurately gauged solar, lunar and zodiac cycles. A mini planetarium, it could predict such things as eclipses. A model of it exists at the Technology Museum in Thessaloniki.

Hero's tech heroics
Hero of Alexandria (100 BC or 1st Century AD) was the last in the 600-year tradition and the link from the Babylonians, via the Arabs, to Renaissance Europe. A great mathematician, physicist and mechanical engineer, he was thought to be a lecturer at the Museum in Alexandria.

His famous aeolipile, a steam-powered engine which had much in common with a jet engine, transformed steam into rotary movement by forcing steam through a small opening in a boiler. But it was a machine without a job, seen largely as a curiosity.

Hero's Pneumatica describes over 100 machines, including a fire engine, a wind organ, even a coin-operated machine. Automata and Balancings includes a rudimentary puppet theatre automaton run by strings, drums and weights while Dioptra tells of a surveying device using triangulation long before English mathematician Leonard Digges' 16th-century telescopic theodolite, which was used in navigation, surveying and civil engineering to determine the direction of roads, tunnels or other structures.

Re-building the past
Many of these items, including models of ancient ships, are on display at the Technology Museum in Thessaloniki and a new exhibition area is planned for the Polytechnic in Athens, says Tassios. But other examples of ancient Greek ingenuity are not limited to models behind a glass casing.

Cyprus and Greece recently co-launched a copy of a 2,300-year-old sailing ship, the actual wreck of which was discovered 40 years ago near the town of Kyrenia, in the north of Cyprus. On its maiden voyage, the vessel, named Kyrenia-Eleftheria (Kyrenia-Freedom), brought copper ingots from Cyprus to Athens for making bronze medals for the 2004 Olympics.

Another ship, this time much older, is also being built in Chania, Crete. It is a full-scale working model of a Minoan ship made entirely with the tools and materials of the age. Crete became a major maritime power thanks to Minoan technology, said Yiannis Loukas, naval history professor at the Hellenic Naval Academy and one of the project organizers. It is hoped the circa 2,400-1,900 BC vessel will be ready to cast anchor by 2004.

We can admire these ancient marvels through modern eyes and only imagine how far we might have progressed had development been continuous, had the Ptolemaic Library, that stored most of the ancient texts, not burnt down in 48 BC, and had there not been those pesky wars that interrupted further development.