The steam engine

Newcomen's atmospheric engine of 1712 pumped water from mines; Watt's separate condenser made it four times more efficient and thus viable away from the coalfields. The decisive change was decoupling from geography: factories no longer had to sit beside a waterfall. The consequences were exponentially rising energy use per head, urbanisation, a new working class — and the beginning of anthropogenic climate change, since the coal we began burning was what the Carboniferous forests had buried.