Q:

Automatically spot piecewise regression breakpoints in data

I am tasked with, for instance, with the following data:

(the axes are unimportant, nor what the data represents for my question). Assuming my degrees of freedom are such that when curvefitting I don't expect to model anything higher than with polynomials of degree 3, and typically they should all be linear. 
The proper fit to the data apparently looks like this:

However, I only managed to fit these two lines because I arbitrarily noted that there seemed to be a break in the qualitative behavior of the data (going from roughly constant to roughly linear) at the point indicated in my graph where the line changed its slope, as chose the models to be linear arbitrarily
Is there some way this could be done without a priori knowledge? I am trying to code a program which automatically opens up a data file and picks out the point between 2 curvefits. I'm looking for guides or explanations or anything like that that would give me the knowledge of how to find the point between 2 different curvefits or models, and then chooses the appropriate model (with the appropriate polynomial degree) for each section of the data.
I think my question essentially is asking how I can learn piecewise regression.
Addendum
James Philips's answer looks to be what I'm looking for, however what I need to now understand is how the code works. I will now note my confusions with it, as the answering of this questions now will rest on how to understand the workings of the code.
def sumOfSquaredError(parameterTuple):
    warnings.filterwarnings("ignore") # do not print warnings by genetic algorithm
    val = func(xData, *parameterTuple)
    return numpy.sum((yData - val) ** 2.0)

What exactly is val? Why are we using a sum of squared errors, and not a mean for instance?

def generate_Initial_Parameters():
    # min and max used for bounds
    maxX = max(xData)
    minX = min(xData)
    maxY = max(yData)
    minY = min(yData)
    slope = 10.0 * (maxY - minY) / (maxX - minX) # times 10 for safety margin

    parameterBounds = []
    parameterBounds.append([minX, maxX]) # search bounds for breakpoint
    parameterBounds.append([-slope, slope]) # search bounds for slopeA
    parameterBounds.append([minY, maxY]) # search bounds for offsetA
    parameterBounds.append([-slope, slope]) # search bounds for slopeB
    parameterBounds.append([minY, maxY]) # search bounds for offsetB

    result = differential_evolution(sumOfSquaredError, parameterBounds, seed=3)
    return result.x

Isn't this just asking for the x and y data, and then creating an array called parameterBounds that just adds to it 1x2 arrays encoding the mins and maxs of x and y respectively, and two arrays with slope in them. 

Why are there [-slope,slope] arrays being appended to "search bounds for slopeA" and "search bounds for slopeB"? Why is it constructed using the max and mins of x and y? Are they guesses as to find the proper slopes of each piece?
What is the 10 doing there, and why is it for "safety margin"?
Isn't differential_evolution used to find the minimum of a multivariate function? What is it exactly doing?
modelPredictions = func(xData, *fittedParameters)
absError = modelPredictions - yData
How come xData and *fittedParameters fulfill the number the required arguments for func?

Finally, how does this code find the breakpoint?

A:

Here is example code fitting two different straight lines to a data set, and also automatically fitting the breakpoint between the two lines. This example uses the standard scipy differential_evolution genetic algorithm module which uses the Latin Hypercube algorithm to ensure a thorough search of parameter space, requiring bounds within which to search. In this example those bounds are taken from the data max and min values.

import numpy, scipy, matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.optimize import curve_fit
from scipy.optimize import differential_evolution
import warnings

xData = numpy.array([19.1647, 18.0189, 16.9550, 15.7683, 14.7044, 13.6269, 12.6040, 11.4309, 10.2987, 9.23465, 8.18440, 7.89789, 7.62498, 7.36571, 7.01106, 6.71094, 6.46548, 6.27436, 6.16543, 6.05569, 5.91904, 5.78247, 5.53661, 4.85425, 4.29468, 3.74888, 3.16206, 2.58882, 1.93371, 1.52426, 1.14211, 0.719035, 0.377708, 0.0226971, -0.223181, -0.537231, -0.878491, -1.27484, -1.45266, -1.57583, -1.61717])
yData = numpy.array([0.644557, 0.641059, 0.637555, 0.634059, 0.634135, 0.631825, 0.631899, 0.627209, 0.622516, 0.617818, 0.616103, 0.613736, 0.610175, 0.606613, 0.605445, 0.603676, 0.604887, 0.600127, 0.604909, 0.588207, 0.581056, 0.576292, 0.566761, 0.555472, 0.545367, 0.538842, 0.529336, 0.518635, 0.506747, 0.499018, 0.491885, 0.484754, 0.475230, 0.464514, 0.454387, 0.444861, 0.437128, 0.415076, 0.401363, 0.390034, 0.378698])

def func(xArray, breakpoint, slopeA, offsetA, slopeB, offsetB):
    returnArray = []
    for x in xArray:
        if x < breakpoint:
            returnArray.append(slopeA * x + offsetA)
        else:
            returnArray.append(slopeB * x + offsetB)
    return returnArray

# function for genetic algorithm to minimize (sum of squared error)
def sumOfSquaredError(parameterTuple):
    warnings.filterwarnings("ignore") # do not print warnings by genetic algorithm
    val = func(xData, *parameterTuple)
    return numpy.sum((yData - val) ** 2.0)

def generate_Initial_Parameters():
    # min and max used for bounds
    maxX = max(xData)
    minX = min(xData)
    maxY = max(yData)
    minY = min(yData)
    slope = 10.0 * (maxY - minY) / (maxX - minX) # times 10 for safety margin

    parameterBounds = []
    parameterBounds.append([minX, maxX]) # search bounds for breakpoint
    parameterBounds.append([-slope, slope]) # search bounds for slopeA
    parameterBounds.append([minY, maxY]) # search bounds for offsetA
    parameterBounds.append([-slope, slope]) # search bounds for slopeB
    parameterBounds.append([minY, maxY]) # search bounds for offsetB

    result = differential_evolution(sumOfSquaredError, parameterBounds, seed=3)
    return result.x

# by default, differential_evolution completes by calling curve_fit() using parameter bounds
geneticParameters = generate_Initial_Parameters()

# call curve_fit without passing bounds from genetic algorithm
fittedParameters, pcov = curve_fit(func, xData, yData, geneticParameters)
print('Parameters:', fittedParameters)
print()

modelPredictions = func(xData, *fittedParameters) 

absError = modelPredictions - yData

SE = numpy.square(absError) # squared errors
MSE = numpy.mean(SE) # mean squared errors
RMSE = numpy.sqrt(MSE) # Root Mean Squared Error, RMSE
Rsquared = 1.0 - (numpy.var(absError) / numpy.var(yData))

print()
print('RMSE:', RMSE)
print('R-squared:', Rsquared)

print()

##########################################################
# graphics output section
def ModelAndScatterPlot(graphWidth, graphHeight):
    f = plt.figure(figsize=(graphWidth/100.0, graphHeight/100.0), dpi=100)
    axes = f.add_subplot(111)

    # first the raw data as a scatter plot
    axes.plot(xData, yData,  'D')

    # create data for the fitted equation plot
    xModel = numpy.linspace(min(xData), max(xData))
    yModel = func(xModel, *fittedParameters)

    # now the model as a line plot
    axes.plot(xModel, yModel)

    axes.set_xlabel('X Data') # X axis data label
    axes.set_ylabel('Y Data') # Y axis data label

    plt.show()
    plt.close('all') # clean up after using pyplot

graphWidth = 800
graphHeight = 600
ModelAndScatterPlot(graphWidth, graphHeight)

