What was originally considered to be just part of some trash inside of a shipwreck was really one of the oldest and most complex pieces of scientific equipment ever made.
A group of sponge divers from Symi island discovered the Antikythera shipwreck during ht spring of 1900.
They would dive into the ship, pluck out artifacts, and bring them to the surface with the intention to sell. They found bronze and marble statues, pottery, glassware, jewelry, coins, and one strange mechanism that nobody really understood. The mechanism was removed from the wreckage in 1901.
All of the items that were retrieved from the wreckage were sent to the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens to be stored and analyzed. At the time, scientists thought it was just a clump of bronze and wood, and it went unnoticed for over two years.
One day in 1902, a member of the museum staff found that the corroded clump of bronze and wood had a gear embedded in it. Many researchers believed that these technologies weren't available at the estimated time period from when the artifacts fell into the ocean.
It took until 1974 for scientists to look deeper into this mechanism. It was discovered that the Antikythera mechanism was actually the world's first known analog computer. It was used to measure the trajectory of the sun decades into the future using theories of astronomy and mathematics that were developed by Greek astronomers during the second century BC.