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.
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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.
In eighteenth-century England, the death penalty was the solution to almost any crime.
In Georgian England, the consensus was that the key to crime prevention was to dangle the hangman’s rope before every would-be criminal’s eyes. Whether he was guilty of shoplifting or murder most foul, the hangman awaited him. Yet to some at the Old Bailey the news that they wouldn’t be up on a hanging charge came as a disappointment, as George Wrong explains.
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.
The British Empire may be said to have started when Elizabethan importers got into a fight with the Dutch over the price of pepper.
The English were more interested in war than trade in the days of Henry VIII, but in the reigns of Henry’s daughters Mary I (1553-1558) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603) English mariners began to imitate their Continental neighbours and reach out to the Far East. This did not greatly please their neighbours, who resented the competition.
The Sultan of Aceh in northern Sumatra welcomed his guests from Christian England with an unexpected gesture of friendship.
In 1601, Sir James Lancaster set out in four ships for India and the Far East, seeking trading partners for England on behalf Queen Elizabeth I and the newly-formed East India Company. He visited the Kingdom of Achin (Aceh) in the north of Sumatra the following year, where the Sultan was graciously pleased to receive this emissary from a backward, cold and infidel land far, far away.
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.
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.