When I first began to write this up for you, I had it in my head that the "Major Age of Invention" didn’t began until something like 1750, with the invention of the steam engine. But when I went back and did my homework, I found that there was a veritable blizzard of inventions in Europe as far back as the Renaissance. It’s amazing how many concepts and designs Leonardo da Vinci authored. We associate him with the Mona Lisa and his ornithopter flying machine but he was working all over the place, designing steam engines, spinning and weaving machines, and all sorts of detailed devices. Another realization was that there were many, many contributors pushing technology on its way during the 1500’s and the1600’s. For example, in 1658, no less than 24,000 pairs of shoes were shipped from England to Virginia. That’s a lot of shoes, considering that the colonists had only settled there 41 years earlier. It also suggests that the English were mass-producing shoes and that the colonists were relying on store-bought shoes rather than shoes their own local cobblers had made.
    The steam engine was the result of other inventions and the needs they generated, although it was also the enabling technology for the powered phase of the Industrial Revolution.
    By 1700, the demand for charcoal for the smelting of iron was threatening to deforest Europe. In 1709, Abraham Darby discovered that coke could be used in lieu of charcoal, but then, some means had to be found for pumping water out of coal mines. At first, teams of horses were used to run the pumps, but that cost too much. The steam engine grew out of a need for a cheaper approach. A similar situation arose with respect to the increasing popularity of cotton cloth in the 1600’s and 1700’s. Cotton thread is a lot finer than wool, so it takes a lot more of it to weave a swatch of fabric. It became "simply impossible to provide enough yarn with the primitive spinning wheels still in use. Even when every available woman and child was pressed into service, the demand could not be met. In Germany, the soldiers in barracks were actually put to work spinning cotton thread. As the need grew more and more urgent, rewards were offered by scientific societies and business organizations for improved methods of producing yarn. In 1760, for example, the English Society of Arts offered a prize for the invention of a machine that would enable one person to spin six threads at once. The result of all this attention to mechanical needs was the development a few years later of the spinning jenny and the water frame, the forerunners of a series of important inventions in the textile industry."
    Note that their approach to this problem was to try to invent a mechanical solution. How different from Greek and Roman times, when additional slaves would have been pressed into service! Modern technological thinking was already in place!
    Of course, it wasn’t until 1820 that steam power was effectively applied to Brompton’s "mule" to give rise to the steam-powered textile mill.
    This whole situation is an object lesson in necessity as the mother of invention. But then one is left wondering: why didn’t it work that way with the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and the India-Indians (or the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, and the Persians)?