Precision machining made it possible to manufacture a wide variety of machines that humans had never created before: steam engines, printing presses, long-range weaponry, electric generators, telegraph wires, telescopes, microscopes—the list goes on—and the synergies created in the resulting expansion of information, science, industry, and military power gave birth to a new kind of society, based not on the limited energy of humans and animals but on the seemingly unlimited energy of fossil fuels. And it all began in the Middle Ages with the invention of the mechanical clock.
