Did Anyone Predict the Industrial Revolution?

Lost Futures
Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:09:46 GMT

The Fighting Temeraire. 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner. (Source: Wikimedia)

Editor’s note: Post 2/30 for Inkhaven

Why did the philosophers fail to anticipate the industrial revolution? I often find myself wondering. On the one hand, you could argue that they weren’t in the business of predicting the future. But on the other hand, I’m sure if you plucked Plato and his students from The Academy and dropped them off in 1910, they’d probably have a few things to say about it. The most transformative event of the past ten thousand years is surely interesting to curious observers of the human condition. But then again maybe it’s not so surprising. Predicting the future is hard. Predicting an exponential at the start of said exponential is even harder.

So did anyone do it? And if so, who was the earliest? Could anyone possibly predict industrialization in antiquity? The middle ages? The age of the printing press? When did the first mind dare to pull back the veil of agriculturalism and sneak a glimpse at the dazzling, terrifying spectacle of the industrial age? We’ll never know for sure of course. But I present two candidates:

Christiaan Huygens

An illustration of Huygens’ gunpowder engine lifting people (Source: Wikimedia)

Christiaan Huygens was a brilliant Dutch scientist and mathematician active during the Dutch Golden Age. This isn’t a Wikipedia entry, so I won’t bother going into too much detail but I’ll mention that among many other achievements, he discovered Saturn’s largest moon Titan and invented the pendulum clock (building off Galileo’s insights). In the 1670s, he also designed the gunpowder engine, a very early kind of combustion engine that utilized gunpowder as its fuel source. In theory, this primeval engine could raise over a thousand pounds (Huygens at one point mentions raising 3,000 pounds over 30ft) but was never actually constructed. Historians today debate whether it could have been built at all. Less than half a century later, Newcomen would build his steam engine and interest in combustion engines faded for the following century. But even more interesting than Huygens’s failed combustion engine was the intellectual rabbit hole it led him down.

By means of this invention, the rapid, explosive effect of gunpowder is harnessed to produce a motion that is governed in precisely the same manner as that of a heavy weight. Moreover, it can serve not only for all purposes where weights are employed, but also for most of those where human or animal power is utilized; thus, it could be applied to hoisting large stones for construction, erecting obelisks, raising water for fountains, and driving mills to grind grain in locations where one lacks the convenience—or sufficient space—to employ horses. Furthermore, this motor possesses the distinct advantage of costing nothing to maintain during periods when it is not in use.

It can also be utilized as an exceptionally powerful spring, such that one could thereby construct machines capable of launching cannonballs, large arrows, and—perhaps—bombs with a force equal to that of conventional cannons and mortars. Indeed, according to my calculations, this would result in a significant saving of the gunpowder currently in use. Moreover, these machines would be far easier to transport than modern artillery, for in this invention, lightness is combined with strength.

This latter feature is of considerable significance and opens the door to inventing—by these very means—new types of vehicles for both water and land travel. And although it may seem absurd, it does not appear impossible to devise a vehicle capable of traversing the air; for the primary obstacle to the art of flight has, until now, been the difficulty of constructing machines that are simultaneously lightweight and capable of generating powerful propulsion. Nevertheless, I readily admit that a great deal of scientific knowledge and inventive ingenuity would still be required to successfully bring such an undertaking to fruition.[1]

-Christiaan Huygens, 1673

Prophetic. I found this quote originally in a strange polemic by a French scholar which argues that the British delayed the industrial revolution by over a hundred years. I’m not sure I buy his arguments, but to my delight, the quote is, as far as I can tell, the real deal.

So there’s our first candidate. 1673. Not bad, the early period of industrialization in Britain would begin by the mid-18th century but much of what he describes would only be developed well into the 19th century and his words were written some 230 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

But, another challenger appears!

Roger Bacon

This second candidate is a stranger case. I’ll open with the quote:

Machines may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man steering them, will be moved faster than if they were filled with rowers; wagons may be built which will move with incredible speed and without the aid of beasts; flying machines can be constructed in which a man… may beat the air with wings like a bird… machines will make it possible to go to the bottom of seas and rivers.[2]

Roger Bacon, c. 1260

Also sounds eerily prophetic. A little background on Roger Bacon. He was a medieval friar and polymath famous for his ingenuity and early developments of empiricism. He was also the first known European to describe gunpowder (unless this part of his works was a later forgery as some scholars believe).

Unlike Huygens, Bacon does not directly identify the exact motive power for these machines for these machines but he does seem to describe at least the transportation revolution element of industrialization. As far as I can tell, this passage is quite a bit more famous than Huygens’s quote, which is very obscure. However, this translation is a bit generous and ignores a lot of context. In the following line of his writing Bacon writes:

But these things were done in ancient times, and have been done in our own times, as is certain; unless it is an instrument of flight, which I have not seen, nor have I known a man who has seen it; but I know the wise man who devised this artifice to accomplish it.[3]

Bacon isn’t attempting to predict the future here and the commonly circulated quote is misleading. He’s describing machines which he believes have already been developed at various times throughout history by various inventors. And he goes even further than that, asserting he personally has seen many of these inventions (aside from flying machines). I’m honestly not exactly sure what he’s talking about with regard to what he has seen. But what I can say is that Bacon lived during a time that was at once both exciting and one in which the information environment was deeply polluted.

Active during the reverberations of the Renaissance of the 12th century, Roger Bacon had access to a much wider corpus of classical texts than his earlier predecessors but also had access to a large variety of pseudepigrapha and it would have been virtually impossible for scholars at the time to distinguish between genuine and forged works in many cases. Because of this, among other things, Bacon believed Alexander the Great had used a submarine.[4]

So I’m less confident about counting Bacon’s claim. There is an inherent fuzziness to this game after all, because what counts as “predicting the industrial revolution” is a nebulous concept. That said, in addition to the haziness of what exactly he’s referring to, Bacon does not so much describe a world transformed by industrialization but rather lists a smorgasbord of wondrous machines. Roger Bacon is a difficult figure to assess, with some scholars professing his status as a visionary thinker, almost a modern man dropped into medieval times. Others are far more cautious, describing him as more of a product of his environment and questioning whether some of his works were in fact later forgeries. To truly have an informed opinion I would have to read far more of his works than I have currently made my way through.

Are there other Candidates?

I leave the reader here with a request. I have found two candidates thus far, two thinkers who arguably anticipated the industrial revolution. But I suspect they are not alone. If anyone out there is able to find more candidates, please message me, I’d be very excited to hear about them.

1. ^

Oeuvres complètes. Tome XXII. Supplément à la correspondance. Varia. Biographie. Catalogue de vente

Original French:

L’effect rapide de la poudre est reduit par cette invention a un mouuement qui se gouverne de mesme que celuy d’un grand poids. Et elle peut servir non seulement a tous les usages ou le poids est employè, mais aussi a la plus part de ceux ou l’on se sert de la force d’hommes ou d’nimaux, de sorte qu’on pourra l’appliquer a monter des grosses pierres pour les bastimens, a dresser des obelisques, a monter des eaux pour les fontaines, a faire aller des moulins pour moudre du bled en des lieux ou l’on n’a pas la commoditè ou assez de place pour se servir de chevaux. Et ce moteur a cela de bon qu’il ne couste rien a entretenir pendant le temps qu’on ne l’employe point.

L’on s’en peut encore servir comme d’un tres puissant ressort, en sorte qu’on pourroit construire par ce moyen des machines qui jetteroient des boulets de canon, de grandes flesches et des bombes peut estre avec une aussi grande force qu’est celle du canon et des mortiers. Mesine selon mon calcul aves espargne d’une grande partie de la poudre qu’on employe maintenant. Et ces machines seroient d’un transport plus facile que n’est l’artillerie d’aujourdhuy par ce que dans cette invention la legeretè est jointe avec la force.

Cette derniere particularite est tresconsiderable et donne lieu a inventer par ce moyen de nouvelles sortes de voitures tant par eau que par terre. et quoy qu’il paroitra absurde pourtant il ne semble impossible d’en trouver quelqu’une pour aller par l’air, puis que le grand obstacle a l’art de voler a estè jusqu’ici la difficultè de construire des machines fort legeres et qui pussent produire un mouvement fort puissant. Mais javoue qu’il faudroit encore bien de la science et de l’invention pour venir a bout d’une telle entreprise.

(Translated to English via Google Translate)

2. ^

Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White (page 134)

3. ^

Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (footnote 29)

Original Latin:

Haec autem facta sunt antiquitus, et nostris temporibus facta sunt, ut certum est; nisi sit instrumentum volandi, quod non vidi, nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi; sed sapientem qui hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco.

(Translated to English via Google Translate)

4. ^

The Letter of Roger Bacon Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic

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