The greeks too, now that I think about it. There’s a number of times in human history when people were on the brink of major technological progress. Maybe the timing was wrong, on the wrong people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe there were just too many stupid people.
But for whatever reason, the industrial revolution didn’t happen until fairly recently, and it’s a good thing.
If the romans had discovered electricity and figured out they could dig up oil for fuel for generators, and for running combustion engines, there wouldn’t have been any left for me now.
Actually, if they had used up all the oil (which is debatable; there’s likely way more of it than the Peak Oil priests think) then perhaps we’d already have advanced civilization to the point where the whole world is running on nuclear power (having realized that wind and solar don’t scale — a fact most of our society has yet to admit).