[Jensson]

> engineering predates modern science by thousands of years

And that engineering sucked, it was the end of the 18 century that it actually started to take off after Newton had invented the basic physics equations.

Before then stuff like projectile trajectories and load calculations were just hunches by people, not something you could trust or work with at scale. That meant a good engineer couldn't transfer their knowledge to a new person, basically making scaling up any kind of invention impossible.

A single person might have been able to make steam engines, but without science he had no way to transmit that knowledge because it is way too finicky for a person to just learn by hunches.