There was a workshop turning out the Antikythera mechanism, it wasn't a one-off device. It had a user manual.

Lathes go ever further back.

Whoever built the pyramids had sufficient precision to make flat surfaces similar to modern surface plates.

The machines have been around for a very long time, powering them with other machines was part of it.

There's a lot to untangle here.

> Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start.

you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :)

I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.

analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by people who had the ability to change things, there wasn't much incentive to make such change - "just buy more slaves"/"just work the slaves harder"