We can point to the first industry to truly mechanize as the beginning of the revolution but the technologies that got us there were legion.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal
[0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-e...
[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chi...
His central observation is that the Industrial Revolution involves "coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy", but that "each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact."
Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine from 1712 were so inefficient that it made only economic sense in circumstances where energy source is very, very cheap. That was inside of coal mines (not in any other kind of mine), because there coal was cheapest. So the Industrial Revolution required as a starting point that all other kinds of energy sources were so expensive that coal mines made sense, and not any kind of coal mines, but deep coal mines that required a lot of effort to pump water out of them. In other kinds of mines horses would have been cheaper than an atmospheric steam engine. In other words, intensive coal mining had to come first and then the Industrial Revolution followed, not the other way round.
It took over half a century, until 1776, that the steam engine in James Watt's desing had been improved so much that its use made economic sense outside of coal mines, namely in the textile industry. It was in the 1700s that looms and especially spinning machines had improved so much that their combination with Watt's steam engine made sense.
Then there was the combination of steam engines with new methods for drilling cannons. The cylinders needed for steam engines used technologies that had been improved over a long period of time in gun production. Then the steam engine itself was combined with the new invention of drilling cannon barrels (instead of casting them). This resulted in better cannons and also helped to further improve the cylinders for the steam engines.
So why not the Romans? -- Devereaux writes:
"_none_ of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn’t; they’re still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn’t have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce."
"And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to."
"All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent."
In other words there was a feedback loop: More coal meant more coal could be mined. A virtuous cycle, that kicked off the industrial revolution.
It's those major step changes that open up the doors to unforeseen opportunities and make previously unviable businesses economically possible.
Before that "research" wasn't really a thing. Discussions between intellectuals were scholastic and often implicitly about political status. The scientific tradition of hands-on experimentation and observation shifted the emphasis to building and trading rather than debating and conquering.
So effectively the UK invented the concept of invention. Other cultures were imperial, martial, and slave-owning, and ambitious men didn't concern themselves with hands-on work. That was for tradesmen and slaves. Although some invention happened, it was outside the main power hierarchy. It wasn't a tradition.
The UK - only partially, but enough - combined mercantile opportunism with practical invention. It took about a century, but invention became a recognisable tradition in its own right, and a credible high-reward career path for ambitious people. (Mostly men of course. But even so.)
Lathes go ever further back.
Whoever built the pyramids had sufficient precision to make flat surfaces similar to modern surface plates.
The machines have been around for a very long time, powering them with other machines was part of it.
There's a lot to untangle here.
you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :)
I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.