When Thomas Telford read Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791, amid the French Revolution, he at once became anxious and angry about the state of the country’s finances. Fellow-Scot Samuel Smiles observed that the great engineer would hardly have allowed anyone to pronounce on bridge-building after reading a single book on the subject.

Telford recommended Paine’s book to his friends back home in Galloway, and freely expressed his dismay at the country’s finances and the British constitution. Happily, for Smiles at any rate, Telford’s revolutionary ardour gradually cooled and soon he no longer had to explain how ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ could justify the killing of so many people.

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