My take is that they were not seeing the point to do so for the most easy one (like a mill, a press...) and from the other hand for clearly useful and advanced device like a vehicle/train it's the lack of amount of available combustible and iron. Even a train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly "why" it could be useful, do you really need to go so far with that amount of people? There were so much less people in the past, same for merchandise quantity probably.

But the response in the article about the knowledge of the "vacuum possibility" is also very interesting, it is not mentioning this but it's crazy to think that we only know that the space emptiness is possible since Einstein theory 100 years ago (and not full of ether).

Or that with the first locomotive people feared to die because of the speed.