I've never researched this, but I wonder if people were very conscious of participating in something (an industrial revolution, a technological shift, a new era) or if it all felt so diffuse and so bottom-up that there wasn't really an awareness of an industrial revolution until long after. I'm sure books have been written on the topic, but I'm curious how the inventors and tinkerers and business-people of 17th and 18th centuries felt about their place in history: did they feel like they were ushering in a new era?