[xyzzyz]

You are giving way too much credit to science in the early phase of industrial revolution. Science has been extremely important in technological development from late 1800s onwards, but the most critical leaps of late 1700s and early 1800s had little to do with Newton-style science. Instead, they mostly about engineering improvements, combined with a newly widespread social attitude that technology actually can be significantly improved. Flying shuttle has not been based on some theoretical scientific model, but rather on experience with making looms and ingenuity in improving them. Similarly, Watt didn’t create his engine based on theory of thermodynamics, instead he just observed that repeatedly heating and cooling the cylinder is wasteful, and came up with a technique to avoid that.

If you follow the development Industrial Revolution, you’ll see that it’s mostly thanks to ingenious engineers, not smart scientists. The scientists did occasionally deliver something valuable, often in fact paradigm-changing, but importantly, this only became very relevant around the turn of 20th century.

[krallja]

> The scientists did occasionally deliver something valuable, often in fact paradigm-changing, but importantly, this only became very relevant around the turn of 20th century.

James Watt was only able to build efficient steam engines because Joseph Black discovered latent heat in 1761. Without steam engines, there’s no industrial revolution.

[xyzzyz]

> James Watt was only able to build efficient steam engines because Joseph Black discovered latent heat in 1761.

No, in fact both Black and Watt explicitly claimed that their research and results were independent.

[shakna]

Whilst Hero's aeolipile is incredibly wasteful, the ancient world did have the right conceptual basis for steam engines to have developed.

[andrewjl]

Any good references you'd recommend for learning more about this?

I read about Oliver Heaviside and that helped shed some light on engineering improvements from that period of time. He was around a bit later in the 1800s, though.

[marcosdumay]

Having forces defined as a quantifiable concept that you can easily predict is quite important for tooling and creating reproducible machines. The Mechanics is quite important for mechanical engineering.

Yes, those engineers were inventing most things by themselves, but they didn't work in a vacuum.