We don't know that. That's hindsight bias. There are so many things that happened before the industrial revolution that contributed. I mentioned the printing pr

We don't know that. That's hindsight bias. There are so many things that happened before the industrial revolution that contributed. I mentioned the printing press and modern mathematics. The creation of a totally different economic system than the Romans had. I also read once about the development of the canon lead to experimenting with better and better metal working. Which eventually allowed steam engines. The Romans had no concept of the scientific method. No concept of machines that could do work or produce energy. The whole philosophy that the universe obeyed simple laws that could be discovered empirically was foreign to them. The Greeks believed that they could discover the laws of the universe just by thinking really hard about them. An interesting take on this is Archimede's Chronophone: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/