Incredible. Amazing how this all happened in a few hundred years as if something woke up.
For millennia we ground our grain with water wheels. But then one day someone said what if we hooked it up to a spindle and it spun yarn, or ran a billows that sent air into a forge and, oh! What if we made the waterwheel run a BIG hammer so we could work a bunch of metal all at once.
The water wheel, the forge, the horse collar, suddenly rather then having to spend our lives doing the basics we could spend it doing the more advanced things.
Instead of us fighting the world it was now doing our hard labor.