The main technological trigger for the revolution was James Watt’s invention and modernization of the steam engine. Steam engines freed production from the constraints of rivers, coal, and watermills, enabling the construction of enormous factories anywhere in the country. At the same time, metallurgy and coal mining developed rapidly, and the creation of a network of railroads and steamships forever changed logistics, linking markets into a single global network. The manual labor of weavers and spinners was rapidly replaced by mechanical machines, whose productivity was hundreds of times greater than human capabilities.