The Bessemer Process, as well, allowed better steam engines. Like it or not, human advances follow at a fairly linear level where, indeed, former advances inform the latter. It's not necessarily so that we lost a bunch of information during the so-called "Dark Ages," it's more that humans then focused on a different set of objectives that nevertheless had a lot of scientific advances unto themselves.
I think it's a lot less linear than often imagined. we took a somewhat weird path through physics due to trusting Aristotle blindly for ~1.5k years. it seems totally plausible that if we reran humanity, gravity, basic E&M, ideal gas law etc all get figured out much earlier.
