Wasn't the workhorse the workhorse before water power, allowing larger scale farming - which itself is another large step in human history towards increased efficiency and mass production that predates both the industrial revolution and the Roman empire.
I believe horses and even people were also used to drive non-agricultural machinery before water and steam.
The underlying theme to all these things feels more like "automation" than any specific energy source which are seemingly arbitrary (whatever is at hand, quite literally sometimes).
The energy source is actually very important, because it dictates how much energy you have to invest to gain extra energy. Using draft animals has a very low rate of return. During my grandparents' time, the draft animals used to produce the food consumed about a third of the total farm produce--and this is likely to be a more efficient farm than any that existed a thousand or two thousand years ago.
Fundamentally, this means you have wildly different costs for energy. Modern electrical energy costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Gasoline fuel costs in the US right now turn out to around eleven cents per kilowatt-hour basis (although obviously an internal combustion engine isn't the same efficiency as a electric engine). By way of comparison, a single workhorse for an entire working day will put out maybe 6 kWh of energy, and the food input requirements for that workhorse are going to cost far more than 60 cents.
Yes, I think thats probably a better way to think of it.
The "water frame" was a key element of the industrialisation, and what was that initially powered by? That's right horses. It was only because they used water later on that it got that name.
The fact that they were basically automating an industry that India had led for centuries, and couldn't compete on wages seems key to the whole thing (and still needed government support to stop the cheap manually produced imports from crushing the early automation).
Another example is the early use of steam engines in iron production, where they were used to pump water, which then did the actual work (because steam engines couldn't rotate yet).
Itβs still energy. The difference in power output between a horse and an engine is quite large. You also need cheap energy in order to automate anything. Energy derived from people and horses is expensive.
Wasn't the workhorse the workhorse before water power, allowing larger scale farming - which itself is another large step in human history towards increased efficiency and mass production that predates both the industrial revolution and the Roman empire.
I believe horses and even people were also used to drive non-agricultural machinery before water and steam.
The underlying theme to all these things feels more like "automation" than any specific energy source which are seemingly arbitrary (whatever is at hand, quite literally sometimes).