SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Stealth bomber come to mind.
Much, much, much of the industrial revolution was really a revolution in manufacturing. Without being able to churn out machine parts that fit together without filing them to fit by hand, the industrial revolution just wouldn't have worked the way it did.
Through out most of history, empires hated trading as it could create vulnerabilities.
That doesn't track with anything I've read about the great empires. They all got rich off trading, and having a big empire enables long distance trade within your empire. Rome traded with Han China and could not get enough silk. One marker in the archaeological record of the fall of the Western Roman empire is the almost complete contraction of trading networks.
More realistically, the "dark ages" were a time of political dislocation and fragmentation of trading networks, so Europe just got a lot poorer. Rome had knit together a vast trading network, but without Roman armies you couldn't trade long distances anymore.
You forget how to build Roman roads when you don't have a government around to build roads, and even if you did, you don't have the money or manpower anyway.
Medieval Europe invented a heavy plow, which the Romans never came up with, so it was not all disintegration.
https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries...
> Largely unaffected from the turbulent political events following the demise of the Western Roman Empire, the importance of watermilling continued to grow under the new Germanic lords. (...) By Carolingian times, references to watermills in the Frankish Realm had become "innumerable".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermi...
My hope is that I am as ignorant about our society's capacity to bootstrap important technologies, as I am in my own capacity to do so.
Not a referral link
I think it's just very difficult to make a rolling wheel. It's not like the Flintstones and the Far Side where you bang some rocks together and get a stone disc that you can then slot into your wheelbarrow (or, say, ride like a unicycle). Metals help a lot, and even bronze came fairly late to America, which didn't develop iron smelting until after Columbus. In Asia, the first (solid wood) wheels date to the Copper Age, close to the time of the domestication of the horse (and the donkey), which presumably provided much of the incentive. Those wheels are fairly fragile, and chariots had to wait for the wood-spoked wheel, which is much more complex.
But spoked wheels are expensive to build; even most of Africa didn't make much use of wheels until the colonial age, despite having iron, which the Americans lacked.
Market forces work in both directions. If I have a chance to 10X my society's output, I'll do a lot to make it happen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
Some argue that inventions like these at the time weren't improved upon because (slave) labour was cheap. But you are right it could be because other technology at the time didn't exist.
But you're right, to make it practically useful required better materials.
You'll need the materials. A lot of strong, cheap steel. Preheated blast furnaces weren't invented until the early 1800's. Thomas Savery had the idea for the steam engine almost a hundred years before the Watt, but Savery's engines kept blowing up because the lack of strong steel.
You'll also need to overcome trade barriers too. You'll also need cheap coal (ironically requiring steam engines to become cost effective) and high quality iron ore (ideally from Sweden). Through out most of history, empires hated trading as it could create vulnerabilities.
There's also the market prerequisites, no one wants your expensive steam engine if a donkey pulling a wheel is cheaper and more reliable.