British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
Young Montague Bertie, Lord Willougby, tended his dying father behind enemy lines.
At eight o’clock on the morning of the 23rd of October, 1642, King Charles I gazed down on the field of Edgehill, and the Parliamentarian army that awaited him there. It was the start of the English Civil War, which would all but end with the King’s execution in January 1649.
A Cornish professor of chemistry with a poetic turn who helped make science a popular fashion.
Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), rather like the more recent American astronomer Carl Sagan, was not only an authority in his field, but a gifted communicator who inspired others to take an active interest in science.
The engineer put his own life on the line for the safety of his fellow-workers in the coal industry.
Cornish Professor of Chemistry and multi-award-winning scientist Sir Humphrey Davy invented a safety-lamp for mines in 1815; but up in Newcastle, colliery employee George (‘Geordie’) Stephenson (1781-1848) was already working on his own design – as if his life depended on it.
The most important English-born composer of Handel’s day, known for his tuneful music and very busy diary.
Though little-known today, Charles Avison (1709-1770) led a busy life composing, teaching and giving daily concerts in North East England, justly gaining a reputation as the 18th-century’s finest English-born composer.
The 17th-century entrepreneur developed a way of smelting iron with coke rather than charcoal, but the Civil War frustrated his plans.
Seventeenth-century Government fuel policy made English iron-smelting so expensive that the country became dependent on cheap foreign imports. Dud Dudley had just devised an alternative process, when the Civil War put the industrial revolution on hold.