Caravels are sailing ships that were invented by the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century. They allowed European explorers to traverse the globe for the first time in human history. The Portuguese invention of the caravel is one of the many reasons why much of the earliest discoveries and voyages of exploration were made by Portuguese explorers like Vasco de Gama, Henry the Navigator, and Ferdinand Magellan.

The Printing Press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg, in the Holy Roman Empire, in the fifteenth century. The invention of the printing press allowed ideas to be spread quickly around European society - it contributed to the momentum of the Protestant Reformation.

The printing press had a greater impact in Europe than in Asia, primarily as a result of the Latin alphabet being smaller than the Chinese alphabet. The Latin alphabet, with its twenty-six characters, allowed mass production to be carried out far more efficiently.

While Britain did have large academic societies surrounding their many universities, they did not have substantially larger academic groups than any other nation. For example, the nation of Prussia overall was the most educated nation on the planet at this point in history due to their compulsory school system.

Pasteur was a famed Medical Biologist. He was the man that invented the process of pasteurization. He also revolutionized the field of vaccinations with his rabies vaccine. He was also the one to bring the concept of cleanliness as a means to fight disease to the fore as a public policy. 

Every plant takes a different amount of nutrients out of the soil. This means if you grow the same plant in the same place for years, then the soil will stop yielding much for food because there is not enough nutrients to sustain the plants. Crop rotation means that if you grow something different in the same spot then the soil has a year to recoup the nutrients it lost thus making the yield constantly high.

The Enclosure movement was born from the idea that large farms were the most productive and therefore it was in society's best interest to give the large farms exclusive rights to these formerly public lands. The name enclosure comes from the name for the border fences that were put up across the English Countryside, called enclosures. 

Selective Breeding was revolutionary for farming and the agricultural business. This new process meant that only the strong animals on any given farm would be bred so as to keep the herds at their best. This also meant that there would be lines of animals that were physically superior to any seen before due to the strong being breed while the week died out over successive generations.

In order to keep a spinning jenny operating at all times at the same pace the Water frame was invented to power it. Most mills of the time were situated on rivers so they could use the flowing of the river to power the mill. The same idea worked to power a spinning jenny as a water frame uses the flow of water to constantly operate the machine.

Iron and coal were essential needs of any nation attempting to be an industrial power. Britain had access to some of the largest deposits of these resources anywhere in the world at the time. This gave them a serious leg up on the competition because they could expand much more rapidly due to this supply.