From water power to steam driven machinery the industrial means of production altered people's lives by reorganizing humanity's relationship with natural elements and changing what people did to earn a living.

Water wheel	Newcomen Engine	Watt's steam engine	ball governor
900 AD	1710	1776	1790s
Periods
Eotechnical	transitional	Paleotechnical

Steam engines --as they became more versatile were freed of being tied to one place-- had a widespread impact on industrial applications, transportation and eventually automation.

Oliver Evans was an American inventor in the 18th century.

"The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another, almost as fast as birds can fly, 15 or 20 miles an hour.... A carriage will start from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day.... Engines will drive boats 10 or 12 miles an hour, and there will be hundreds of steamers running on the Mississippi, as predicted years ago."

Oliver Evans, 1800

He perfected a completely automated flour mill and the steam driven vehicle.
Evan's automated Mill based on the Archimedean screw	Oruktor Amphibolus

The early steam locomotive, railroad engine.

1829, "mechanical drawing" of the exterior and interior of the "Tom Thumb:"

Peter Cooper of New York in 6 weeks time built the Tom Thumb, a vertical boiler 1.4 HP (horse power) locomotive, for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Peter Cooper's steam locomotive hauled 36 passengers at 18 mph in August 1830. It had a revolving fan for draught, used gun barrels for boiler tubes, and weighed less than one ton.

It was not such an immediate success, as it was a signal, of fast transportation changes yet to come. Steam locomotion set in place a series of transformations that would profoundly alter space and time before it was even fifty years old. Born of the English industrial need for coal extraction from ever deeper mines, the locomotive run by steam consumed wood to boil the water. So, eventually, due to such consumption of timber and water resources railways became a major investor in land, development and banking. Peter Cooper's engine became a symbol of extravagant opportunities and unbelievable changes in society, economics, politics, and environmental sciences.

As a corporate institution the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was the means by which a small revolution in machinery led to a huge change in the use of resources, the organization and management of labor and the transformation of the nations that employed railways to replace canals as the principle form of mass transportation. Technology was moving from the instrument scale to the mechanized level of operation and such a change laid the foundations for even more extensive use of machinery than anyone could even imagine transforming the Enlightenment's hopes into the industrial realities of a mechanically engineered world.