The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION had begun in Britain during the mid-18th century, but the American colonies lagged far behind the mother country in part because the abundance of land and scarcity of labor in the New World reduced interest in expensive investments in machine production.
Samuel Slater copied a design for a windmill from a british model and it increased the time that cotton thread could be spun into yarn. This was the thing that first started the industrial revolution in the US.
