A conventional date for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is about 1770. This date corresponds fairly well to the substantive beginning of several developments that, taken together, seem to mark the difference in character between the industrial age and the pre-industrial world.
James Watt's steam engine made possible the application of artificially generated power to a wide range of processes, unlike its far more limited predecessor the Newcomen engine. The technique of mass production began to be pursued in a systematic and regular way, enough so for Adam Smith to employ his famous example of a pin-making factory as a contrast to traditional craft production. The publication of The Wealth of Nations itself both promulgated and marked a changing conception of what wealth was and how it was created; while Smith's economic theory might not be a necessary condition for industrialism, it clearly lent itself to industrial development. Most broadly, 1770 was roughly the time that "dark Satanic mills" began to proliferate across the British landscape, beginning the shift from a primarily rural agrarian society to an urban and industrial one. If, however, 1770 is adopted as a reasonable beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it would appear that transportation lagged far behind extraction industries such as coal mining or production industries such as textiles. The British transportation world of 1770 presents to our eyes a decidedly pre-industrial appearance. It was and remained for decades to come a world of wood, wind, and horse-flesh: sailing ships in coastal and overseas trade, and horse-drawn barges, stage coaches, and wagons in inland transport; harkening back more to Elizabethan or even medieval times than forward to the transport of the industrial age.
Not until 1802 did the first practical steamboat enter British commerce, and steam did not oust sail, or even seriously challenge it in most ...