Discovery and Invention
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Discovery and Invention’
On the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 24th, 1497, Venetian navigator John Cabot claimed North America for the King of England.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean islands, and was hailed as the first European to see the Americas. But this was not North America, the region where the great English-speaking nations of Canada and the United States would later rise. That was discovered — or rediscovered, since the Vikings had been there long before — five years later in 1497.
After an accident at a level crossing, the bosses of the Leicester and Swannington Railway acknowledged that drivers needed more than lung power.
Engineer George Stephenson was the principal shareholder in the Leicester and Swannington Railway, which opened in June 1832, not yet seven years after Stephenson’s historic Stockton and Darlington line carried the public for the first time. The L&SR had been running for just under a year when there was an accident at a level crossing, and Mr Ashlen Bagster, manager of the line, had a brainwave.
For George Stephenson, the motto of the Stockton and Darlington Railway was a code to live by.
However pure Science may be, a scientist’s head may be turned by ambition, politics or gain, resulting in great harm to social and economic progress. Happily, George Stephenson was not such a man, as Michael Longridge of Bedlington Iron Works testified in a letter (here abridged) to Edinburgh engineer George Buchanan in January 1832.
Victorian economist Alfred Marshall argued that it was no accident that free societies and coal-powered industries are found together.
In 1878, Alfred Marshall, one of the most influential British economists of his day, looked back over a hundred years of social progress. For some, the French Revolution (1789) was the key, for some the Communist Manifesto (1848). But Marshall believed that what had liberated the people and raised their standard of living to new heights was not political idealism, but coal and steam.
Amy Johnson of Hull had clocked only ninety hours of flying experience before taking off alone for Australia.
On May 5th, 1930, Amy Johnson left Croydon Airport at the controls of her Gipsy Moth biplane, bound for Australia. She reached India in six days, but hopes of breaking more records were dashed by a catalogue of mishaps. The day before she landed at Darwin on May 24th, the first woman to complete the solo flight, Stanley Spooner of Flight International reminded readers what a feat it would be.
Employees are the key to any entrepreneur’s success, and he must know them intimately, trust them completely and pay them generously.
Scottish engineer James Nasmyth, son of an Edinburgh artist, set up the Bridgewater Foundry in Patricroft, Salford, in 1836. He tells us in his Autobiography that in the competitive market of Victorian heavy industry, the key to success was making sure that his employees never wanted to work for anyone else.