https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industr...
> Improvements to the steam engine were some of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution, although steam did not replace water power in importance in Britain until after the Industrial Revolution
Wasn't the workhorse the workhorse before water power, allowing larger scale farming - which itself is another large step in human history towards increased efficiency and mass production that predates both the industrial revolution and the Roman empire.
I believe horses and even people were also used to drive non-agricultural machinery before water and steam.
The underlying theme to all these things feels more like "automation" than any specific energy source which are seemingly arbitrary (whatever is at hand, quite literally sometimes).
Fundamentally, this means you have wildly different costs for energy. Modern electrical energy costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Gasoline fuel costs in the US right now turn out to around eleven cents per kilowatt-hour basis (although obviously an internal combustion engine isn't the same efficiency as a electric engine). By way of comparison, a single workhorse for an entire working day will put out maybe 6 kWh of energy, and the food input requirements for that workhorse are going to cost far more than 60 cents.
The "water frame" was a key element of the industrialisation, and what was that initially powered by? That's right horses. It was only because they used water later on that it got that name.
The fact that they were basically automating an industry that India had led for centuries, and couldn't compete on wages seems key to the whole thing (and still needed government support to stop the cheap manually produced imports from crushing the early automation).
Another example is the early use of steam engines in iron production, where they were used to pump water, which then did the actual work (because steam engines couldn't rotate yet).
I’d argue the difficulty of mining and burning coal are what kicked off the industrial revolution. Mines necessitated the invention of coal powered pumps and other equipment. To burn coal efficiently you need iron stoves which drove demand for foundries and metallurgical development. Once you’ve got lots of coal and lots of iron and people who know how to work with it you start getting bright ideas about other things you can do with all that coal and iron.
Even Canal Mania, the Industrial Revolution mass expansion of boat transport using horses and artificial ditches (all tech familiar to the Romans) kicked off in the 1760s as a way to get coal out of the Duke of Bridgwater's mines.
So the overly neat "its was all about coal" story doesn't really hang together.
One of the first canals in the UK was built, because someone blocked the river with a weir, so that they could run a watermill. It's all a bit fractal.
But it took heavy loads of coal and the economics of canal operating companies halving the coal price in Manchester to convince people it was a good idea to invest in building artificial ditches up hills all over the country to return a profit[1], which of course then opened up scope for new industrial enterprises alongside them. The Romans were perfectly capable of that level of engineering, but they focused on other things, even closer to home.
Agree that "it's all about coal" is too simplistic, but coal was a big deal even before steam mills and trains were commonplace.
[1]not all of them did, obviously. But at least they had limited liability corporations by then...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_lat%C3%A9ral_%C3%A0_la...
Personally, I prefer the latter view, on account of how the various stages interacted. Water-powered mechanical fabric manufacture greatly expanded the use case for rotary-output steam engines, and both technologies took off synergistically when the latter became available with sufficient efficiency. Mechanized manufacture greatly expanded the use case for mechanized transport...
No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower). Steam engines used coal, ie fossil fuels. By your defintion, even nuclear plants would be "water power".
Which is what powered most factories throughout the industrial revolution. Not using electricity obviously, machines would be connected by belt to overhead power shafts, which were connected to a water wheel.