Is the Industrial Revolution Possible Without Water Power?

There was an awful lot going on in the area of innovation, particularly around automation. This was contemporaneously with the steam engine and before it was actually applied in the factory setting. It's a very good question as to whether or not you could have had an industrial revolution if you hadn't harnessed fossil fuels through steam engines. I think it would have petered out. And so automating human processes can be done with other forms of energy, but it probably doesn't quite get the auto catalytic property of heat to work.

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