Science & Technology

From the fourteenth century until the building of the railways, writes D.J. Rowe, the Newcastle keelmen were indispensable and pugnacious carriers between collieries and sea-going ships.

Meyrick Carre introduces James Howell; an enquiring disciple of the new astronomers who enlivened the British seventeenth-century scene, and ended his life as historiographer-royal to Charles II.

C.G. Cruickshank describes bows and fire-arms in the early sixteenth century.

Stuart Andrews describes how the founder of Methodism shared the encyclopaedic concern with science that characterizes the eighteenth century.

A.F. Tilley explains how the Greeks propelled their boats.

George A. Rothrock describes how the age of Enlightenment was eager for secular, rational explanations of the world, and welcomed the scepticism of Diderot’s contributors.

William Seymour introduces the scientist, architect, gardener, forester and book-collector, John Evelyn; one of the most distinguished polymaths of the English seventeenth century.

Derek W. Lawrence portrays 1769 as a fateful year for the world: Napoleon and Wellington were both born in it; and James Watt took out a patent for his momentous steam-engine.

W. Brownlie Hendry describes how a sixteenth-century Scottish laird, with, in Gibbon's words, ‘a head to contrive and a hand to execute,’ worked out the powerful aid to mathematical calculation known as logarithms.

Alex Keller describes how the closing years of the sixteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth marked the first period in England of important technological advance.