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> Steam engines and their descendants largely replaced the jobs which were done by horses and mules

> for example, the automation of textile industry

How many horses and mules were working in the textile industry again?



As you have noticed, the last paragraph is about other types of automation during the industrial age than the steam engine.


What do you think that was powering that automation exactly?


In the textile industry many of the major changes were from better devices, not neccesarily of how they were powered.

The cotton gin revolutionized the industry while it was still people-powered, including by slave labor (edit: and also horse-powered); and the Luddites (some decades after Ned Ludd) rebelled not against the looms being powered by steam but rather against the Jacquard loom - an add-on to the exiting looms which allowed complex products to be weaved by unskilled people, removing their bargaining power despite not changing a thing about how the loom was powered.


The "how they were powered" was quite important in the magnitude of many of those changes though.

"Although some were driven by animal power, most early mills were built in rural areas at fast-flowing rivers and streams using water wheels for power.[3] The development of viable steam engines by Boulton and Watt from 1781 led to the growth of larger, steam-powered mills allowing them to be concentrated in urban mill towns, like Manchester, which with neighbouring Salford had more than 50 mills by 1802.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_mill




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