www. bankofengland. co. uk / speeches such as electricity, the internal combustion engine and sanitation. the third came in the middle of the th 20 century with new gpts such as computing, digitisation and the internet. yet in each case the playbook was familiar from the first industrial revolution. the emergence of a new strain of gpts resulted in an outward shift in the production possibility frontier and capital - deepening. with higher levels of investment in physical and human capital, the productivity of companies, the wages of workers and the living standards of societies continued their northerly ascent. the golden era continued. some people are now discussing the next innovation wave, a so - called fourth industrial revolution. the gpts driving this are likely to include artificial intelligence ( ai ), big data, automation, robotics, 3d - printing and nano - technology. i will return to the fourth industrial revolution when discussing future growth. a different growth story as appetising as this growth story sounds, a reading of the history books make it difficult to swallow whole. it is certainly plausible to think that a divine coincidence of hargreaves, watts and arkwrights, in roughly the same place at roughly the same time, resulted in a white - hot crucible of creativity. indeed, we might be seeing that self - same crucible of creativity in silicon valley today. but the industrial revolution was hardly the first firing of that crucible. we have, through history, seen many episodes of furnace - hot crucibles of innovation, spanning most continents and most centuries. successful cities, regions, countries, continents and empires of the recent and distant past were often built and sustained on ideas and innovation and accompanying investment in machines and people. the roman empire is a case in point. some of you will remember the sequence from monty python ’ s the life of brian which begins with the rhetorical question : “ what did the romans ever do for us? ” the sketch concludes : “ but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the romans done for us? ” you do not need to go that far back for examples of big ideas which had a transformative impact on industry and society. immediately prior to the industrial revolution and running chronologically, these included the th th th windmill in the 12 century, the mechanical clock in the 13, the cannon in the 14, the printing press in

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