I think steam engines prototyped a lot of the needed technology like lubrication, manufacturing of precision shafts and heat resistance which then could be applied to the gas engine.
There's an interesting example of technological synergy at the dawn of the steam engine industry.
To build an effective steam engine, you need a precisely ground piston and a precisely bored cylinder, otherwise you can't get useful working pressures. Grinding the piston is laborious but straightforward - you just need two centers and a cutting tool to achieve a rotationally symmetrical part. Boring the cylinder is much more challenging, because you need to cut a very wide, very deep, very straight hole into a huge lump of iron. Cutting that hole requires a very rigid, very powerful machine.
John Wilkinson developed an effective boring machine in 1774 for making cannons, but it was limited in speed and capacity by the water wheel that powered it. The next year, the Boulton & Watt company was founded, building stationary steam engines with cylinders made by Wilkinson. Wilkinson received the second steam engine built by Boulton & Watt, which he used to power a bigger and faster cylinder boring machine, which he used to build more and bigger steam engine cylinders for Boulton & Watt.
This also shows the curious paradox (if it’s a paradox) that we can’t easily re-create many of the industries from scratch. We’ve had many intermediate steps that we discarded along the way.
In other words, modern industry is the product of modern industry.
There are points in mechanical history where you have a real problem taking the next step. The classic is "who made the first tongs?" You need a handling tool that will survive fire to do blacksmithing. How was the first one made? It's ascribed to God in some Jewish text and to Thor in some Viking legend. Probably someone used chipped rocks as handling tools.
Another bootstrapping problem is making a precise screw thread without another screw, as in a lathe, to use as a reference. This was solved by Maudsley, who invented the "screw originating machine".[1]
The sequence for bootstrapping machine tools from a very low level is well known, because hobbyists sometimes build their own machine tools and need to take upward steps. Hammer, anvil, forge, lathe, better lathe, better lathe, good lathe, planer, bigger planer, drill press, better drill press, milling machine, better milling machine, good milling machine. There's a set of books on this intended for a post nuclear disaster. (It assumes you have aluminum scrap around.) Electronics is tougher to cold start.
The plans and steps all require a computer (cept for the simplest of chips which would'be been originally hand-designed). This means that if there's some planetwide disaster that wiped all electronics, we'd have to restart from scratch as even viewing the blueprints of a chip requires a chip!
Lubrication is, I think, and under-appreciated aspect here.
Trains got substantially more efficient circa 1850-1950, more miles-per-ton, and I believe the reason was essentially that they made hotter steam, because efficiency is bounded by the temperature difference (thanks to Carnot). And the limitation on how hot you could make steam, in any given decade, was that you needed the cylinder to still be lubricated at that temperature, and this technology slowly advanced.
I think this is one of the reasons internal combustion engines didn't appear sooner. They are necessarily quite hot, even more so for diesel, which is later (and more efficient).
We didn't have "good" machine tooling for mass production of metal parts until the 1880/1890s. The technology existed but it was all exotic and high priced because we just weren't good at making metal stuff.
Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population sometime in the 1840s. That's sounds like a lot of metal wheels & rails to me, certainly not space-ship exotic. Although of course things continued to grow from there.
That's a funny comment. The colonies had a smattering of railways, most colonial subjects probably never saw any railways or trains. Heck, for an example, look at how the African railway networks look in 2019 (!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union_of_Railways#/med...
This is an odd tangent, though, if you are interested in humanity's ability to do fine metalworking etc. and how this influenced what transport technologies were viable in what year. This isn't about rural backwaters, anywhere. It's reasonable to define mass adoption to mean that millions are using the thing, although obviously the first million will be in advanced bits of the world.
