Discovery and Invention

How appropriate that the comic opera ‘Patience’ should introduce the world to the results of thirty years of labour.

Local boy Joseph Swan (1828-1914) worked for his brother-in-law in the pharmaceutical firm of Mawson, Swan and Morgan in Newcastle. He can claim to be one of the architects of modern living.

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Michelangelo had a message for all serious entrepreneurs.

In business as in life, little things can make a big difference, as this story about Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564) shows.

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When Harrison won the Longitude Prize, fair and square, Parliament wouldn’t pay up.

Yorkshireman John Harrison was a carpenter by trade, but he taught himself clockmaking to such a high standard that he came to the attention of the Astronomer Royal, Edmund Halley.

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A self-made man who never forgot his humble beginnings.

George Stephenson (1781-1848) was an illiterate boy from the North East, who, through his pioneering railways and steam engines, became arguably the most important civil engineer in world history.

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Baird’s inventions didn’t always work as well as his televisions.

Scotsman John Logie Baird (1888-1946) built and demonstrated the first working TV, which he assembled largely from ordinary household objects in his own home.

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Richard Trevithick’s boss hailed the engineer as a genius. Today he’d have been fired. (Oh, and the train was delayed.)

Richard Trevithick neglected the job he was hired for, and diverted Research and Development funds into a hare-brained private project to get a steam engine to haul itself and some waggons along a railway not designed for that purpose. In 1803, his boss hailed him as a genius. Today, he’d have been fired.

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