Yes I inverted it to burning coal is called the industrial revolution because I think it’s neat way to look at it.
I’m thinking through the history of energy: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.
Yes I inverted it to burning coal is called the industrial revolution because I think it’s neat way to look at it.
I’m thinking through the history of energy: We burned wood. Then we burned coal. Then we burned oil. Then we burned atoms.
That is not a useful way of thinking of things. We have been burning oil and coal for a very very long time. Coal has been used in smiths to forge metal and oil to light lamps for 1000s of years.
It is not what we burnt that changed, it is what we did with the energy that changed things. Aka the steam engine was the real keystone technology in the industrial revolution. It was not the burning of oil that changed anything - but the internal combustion engine being put into cars.
If you didn’t have things to burn, then you couldn’t access certain advancements. Not nearly as easily anyway. We would have needed charcoal for steam engines. Or your example, how would we have processed ore into metal without coal (on any significant scale). Maybe charcoal again. Without something liquid (and very energy dense) combustion engines would have been very hard. Maybe ethanol, but production of that would have been hard. I think advancement has been very dependent on easy, energy dense energy sources.
We have been processing ore into metal with coal for thousands of years. It sounds like you are arguing that the industrial revolution has been happening for thousands of years. Which it has not.
We also made bread in the industrial revolution which is needed to feed the workers. Without feeding the workforce we could not access certain advancements. Is bread a corner stone technology of the industrial revolution? No it is not. It in no way defines what the industrial revolution was. Just like coal or oil.
You can run a steam engine off of coal, wood, oil, nuclear, basically anything that creates a lot of heat. Coal is more convenient in a lot of ways but it did not unlock anything special. If not for coal we could use wood or charcoal. That was the steam engine, not the fuel it runs on.
And if the advancements were because of these fuels that why did it not happen 1000s of years ago when we had access to them?
Treadles were the first source of power in the industrial revolution. Coal came way later.