Discovery and Invention
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Discovery and Invention’
Sir Humphry Davy pleads with Britain’s scientists not to be bought by Napoleon’s gold.
Soon after Napoleon Bonaparte embarked on his quest for a united Europe in 1803, Sir Humphry Davy gave a lecture in which he urged Britain’s scientists to support their country’s sovereignty and commercial freedom, rather than sell out their country in the expectation of funding from Napoleon’s Europe.
As Japan’s ruling shoguns resist the tide of progress, a Nagasaki-based Scottish entrepreneur steps in.
The story of Japan’s first railway is bound up with the story of the country’s emergence from two centuries of self-imposed isolation. It is a tale in which the British played an important role, from engineer Edmund Morel to Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant and railway enthusiast who took considerable risks to forge Japan’s lasting ties with the British Isles.
The unsung surveyor from Cheshire, who built railways and made friends across the world.
The Victorian railway engineer Thomas Brassey (1805-1870) is not the household name that he perhaps ought to be, chiefly because he worked through agents and alongside partners. Nonetheless, his knowledge and business acumen lies behind much of the rail network in Britain, and helped start the railway revolution from France to Australia.
George Stephenson won the admiration of French navvies by showing them how a Geordie works a shovel.
George Stephenson was arguably history’s most influential engineer, yet he never really gave up being a Northumberland miner. He always retained his Geordie ordinariness, and was never happier than when he was among his fellow working men.
Businessmen in Liverpool engaged George Stephenson to build one of his new-fangled railways.
The first purpose-built freight and passenger railway line linking two cities was opened in 1830, joining the port of Liverpool with the mills around Manchester. The social and economic impact was instant, bringing more real and tangible benefit to Britain’s common man than he had ever known before.
To the poor of England, the Worcestershire man gave affordable pots and pans, and to all the world he gave the industrial revolution.
Seventeenth-century England’s industrial productivity had stalled. Her forests could no longer supply charcoal for smelting; iron was mostly imported from Russia and Sweden; fine metal kitchenware was a luxury of the rich. Government funded various barren initiatives, but Worcestershire entrepreneur Abraham Darby (1678-1717) made the breakthrough.