By 1850, England and Wales were consuming nine times as much energy as Italy, and English entrepreneurs and factories had access to prime movers of colossal power. Steam locomotives could generate two hundred thousand watts of energy (yes, James Watt gave his name to the unit), or about two hundred times the energy supplied by a two-horse plow team, one of the most important prime movers of the agrarian era. More cheap energy was available than ever before. English industry took off. Coal was generating as much energy as could have been extracted from woodlands covering 150 percent of the area
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