Science & Technology

The early British engineers were masters of precise machinery; L.T.C. Rolt describes how sophisticated mass-production overtook them from America.

Success in warfare has come to depend more and more upon elaborate technical planning. Antony Brett-James describes this modern trend through the invention of new weapons and the provision and proper use of transport.

A geological discovery in the 1820s, writes A.D. Orange, altered the views of scholars upon the Mosaic story of the Creation and the Flood.

Bela Menczer describes the various intellectual and artistic personalities who conspired to produce the Exposition Universelle, in Paris, in 1867.

R.B. Chevenix Trench documents how early English naval technology attempted to warn of impending seaborne attacks.

A milestone in railway transportation, George Stephenson's first steam train was unveiled on July 25th, 1814.

Brian Bowers assesses the first fifty years of public electricity supply in the United Kingdom and its scientific background.

During the Industrial Revolution, many “dark Satanic mills” arose to scar the English landscape. But in Gloucestershire, writes Esther A.L. Moir, home of the cloth industry, commerce and the art of architecture achieved a happy compromise.

During the years before the French Revolution, writes D.M. Walmsley, Mesmer’s treatment of patients by 'animal magnetism' in some ways foreshadowed the methods of modern pyschiatry.

Engineer, journalist, inventor, Herbert Spencer became one of the most influential prophets of the Victorian Age. J.W. Burrow describes how his Synthetic Philosophy was an encyclopedic attempt to construct a system of “unified knowledge,” in which the facts of Darwinian natural science were blended with transcendental metaphysics.