The country was a place where men worked from dawn to dark, and the laborer lived not in the sun, but in poverty and darkness. What aids there were to lighten labor were immemorial, like the mill, which was already ancient in Chaucer’s time. The Industrial Revolution began with such machines; the mill wrights were the engineers of the coming age. James Brindley of Staffords hire started himself made career in 1733 by working at mill wheels, at the age of seventeen, having been born poor in a village. Brindley’s improvements were practical: to sharpen and step up the performance of the water wheel as a machine. It was the first multi-purpose machine for the new industries.