16.
The heavy moldboard plow, widespread in northwestern Europe by the tenth century, was one of the seminal innovations of the region's agricultural revolution and belated economic rise.
[image]
17.
Northern Europe's many navigable and fastrunning rivers became arteries of commerce and production. Waterwheel-powered bread flour gristmills, like this old wooden waterwheel mill in northwestern France, were ubiquitous.
[image]
18.
Water power was applied most notably to medieval industrial production, including rolling iron, as shown at this 1734 Swedish mill, and to drive huge leather bellows to heat furnaces for high-volume iron casting.
[image]
19.
[image]
20.
Europe's world dominance began after 1500 with the advent of transoceanic sailing and long-range naval cannonry, which followed the Voyages of Discovery championed by Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator. Vasco da Gama (19) sailed around Africa's cape to India, and Columbus crossed the Atlantic to the New World, with the help of the discovery ship par excellence, the caravel (20).
[image]
21.
[image]
22.
The apogee of naval power in the age of sail was achieved by England, whose two greatest admirals, Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson (21), helped defeat the Spanish Armada and Napoleon, respectively. A 120-cannon French warship (22) from the Nelson-Napoleonic era.
[image]
23.
[image]
24.
In 1763, James Watt (23) began repairing this model of Newcomen's early steam engine (24). The result was the modern steam engine, the seminal invention of the Industrial Revolution.
[image]
25.
Powerful steam engines, like Watt's rotary motion 1797 model, superseded waterwheels to drive the world's great early automated factories and iron mills that underpinned the world dominance of the nineteenth-century British empire.
[image]
26.
[image]
27.
Robert Fulton's (27) Clermont Clermont (26) on New York's Hudson River ushered in the age of river steamboats. Fulton's vigorous advocacy for American canals also helped spur the development of the Erie Canal. (26) on New York's Hudson River ushered in the age of river steamboats. Fulton's vigorous advocacy for American canals also helped spur the development of the Erie Canal.
[image]
28.
Forsaken in love, the Duke of Bridgewater focused his energies on pioneering the building of a canal in 1761 from his coal mine to Manchester. His success ignited a national canal-building boom that transformed England's economy.
[image]