Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III

“It wasn’t as though people, after millennia of head-scratching, suddenly “discovered” the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions worthwhi

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Why was no one even experimenting with two-wheeled vehicles until the 1800s? And why was no one, as far as we know, even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?

Over the centuries, people have invented many different kinds of machines that help us do things and improve living standards. But in a very general way, what most of these inventions do is let us substitute some form of power for human effort. And as long as we were totally ignoring the costs of burning coal and oil, this was a great mechanism for... See more