Speculative fiction is at least as old as human history, depending on how you qualify myth, legend, cosmology, theology, and folktales. In the book 3000 Years of Fantasy and Science Fiction early examples include Plato's description of Atlantis in Timaios (c. 360 BC), and Cyrano de Bergerac's A Journey to the Moon (1657).

Many pre-industrial writings concern some aspect of technology - not necessarily in a science fiction concept, but with some recognizable genres. in Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction 26-27, S. T. Joshi writes:

The Per thaumasion (On Marvels) by Phlegon of Tralles (early first century C.E..), a freedman of the Emperor Hadrian, is a prime instance of the accidental nature of the transmission of ancient texts. This text is itself fragmentary, but it is only one example of a minor but apparently popular genre in antiquity--what nineteenth-century scholars somewhat cumbersomely labelled paradoxography, or accounts of miracles and marvels. This genre goes back at least to the poet Callimachus in the third century B.C.E., and such luminaries as Varro and Cicero evidently dabbled in it; their works, however, do not survive, but Phlegon's, written in a rather crude and easily understood Greek, does. Phlegon is a kind of Charles Fort of the ancient world, having amassed bizarre and generally preposterous stories of giant bones, women turning into men, monstrous births, and so forth [...]

These Fortean books existed alongside seldom-less-fantastical encyclopedias like Pliny's Natural History and Herodotus' Histories - and (much) later on, books of secrets and traveler's tales like The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, so it was sometimes difficult to credit which were pure fiction and which were accurate accounts, but certainly authors of all ages have used technology in their writing - sometimes fantastically, sometimes speculatively.

So there are plenty of pre-19th century historical texts that contain stories with "science fictional" elements, or centered around some piece of technology - real or miraculous - such as automatons, fantastic vehicles, etc. Some of these were based on the technology of the day, others appears strictly fantastical, but most conform to the syntax of the era. So for example, you're not going to get healing nanoprobes in the 1,001 Nights, but you have healing herbs and herbs of immortality - same basic concept, just adapted to a more familiar (and acceptable) technology.