Ask whatever questions you will and fear no reprisals.
You're thinking of the Antikythera mechanism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Didn't think either Gibbonese "Christianity did it" or Finley's "Slavery did it" was all that popular any more.
There is a giant thread on this subject already (lack of technological progress in the roman empire).
Technological development in premodern times did, however, in my opinion, often had little to do with the halls of scholars. As late as the early 20th century, many natural scientists prided themselves on working on things that had "no practical application whatsoever" (sic C.P. Snow, who in 1959 accounts that is his youth several physics professors had held to this tenet) - the entry of the state into systematic applied science - based development, with a few rare forerunners (and of course rewards for someone who invented something useful - after the fact, and outside government control or guidance), was around WW1. In antiquity, the middle ages and the early modern period, the technologists were often rather faceless individuals; the only reason we remember the goldsmith Gutenberg was probably because he was the inventor of the machine that would eventually change all that.
There is no current consensus on what builds or develops technology. Stability seems like a poor candidate, though: development seems to thrive on somewhat turbulent social conditions and competition (although this, of course, is just another theory) - if continuity and social stability was the deciding factor, the chinese would be colonizing Alpha Centauri by now
. From the 1950s on the old bias that the medieval world was technologically primitive was exploded, and from the 1970 on Finley (et.al.)'s observations on roman technological primitiveness (or rather, slow developmentness) gets whittled away.
A roman industrial revolution seems unlikely (see Greene 1990, among others), just as a medieval industrial revolution (se Cipolla's hypothesis and his many detractors.) seems to have been overenthusiastic. The early modern period, or Sung China, all have had their obstacles to the sort of developments that occured in England in the 18th/19th century. Steam power was probably known earlier than Hero and was in fact utilized in things like household applications (I have seen a 13th century device that used steam heated by the cooking oven to turn a cooking spit, with the steam coming from a so-called "Aeolian head"), and waterpower was used in many industrial processes from the ancient world until today, but it is only in industrial revolution britain that we see...well...the industrial revolution.
I think this is one of those areas where we will never have a proper answer. Considering how weak the sources are on the roman period (and subsequently less weak, but still weak, on the medieval, and (less weak than medieval, but still weak) early modern until the growth of the bureaucracies), and that even the causes of the industrial revolution in well-documented 19th century England are so hotly debated (Capitalism? Bureaucracy? Urban population? Protestantism? Magic Elves?) I think this subject is one that's gonna keep the scholars and the laymen awake at night with no real solution for years to come.