Science & Technology

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.

Barrie St. Clair McBride introduces Charles-Marie de la Condamine, a soldier-scholar, and one of the first European travellers to investigate South America in a genuinely scientific spirit.

Born near Leeds, a builder of bridges, canals and an inventor of mechanical equipment, George John Smeaton was an eminent forerunner of his profession.

An accomplished Latin poet, no less distinguished in “council and prudent matters of state,” an expert cartographer and an enterprising ship-builder, William Petty was a many-sided man, typical of the scientific spirit of the later seventeenth century. By K. Theodore Hoppen.

Count Zeppelin and his successors in Germany and Britain backed an invention that failed; but David Sawers describes how, during its lifetime, the airship attracted the enthusiasm of many aeronautical engineers.

John Cohen traces the ancestry of modern automation back through the curious mechanical inventions of past centuries to the twilight figures of remote mythology.