Science & Technology

Joanna Richardson describes the life and work of the French father of science fiction.

In 1785, writes Mary Beth Norton, a Loyalist physician from Boston made the first aerial flight across the English Channel.

Brunel's crossing opened on December 8th, 1864.

C. Northcote Parkinson traces the development of the tin mining and plating processes, from Chinese joss-sticks, to the modern tin can.

Christopher Lloyd traces the development of naval missile technology alongside the often adverse reactions these “infernal machines” provoked.

Describing the First World War as ‘an engineers’ war’, which required ‘arms more than men’, Lloyd George acted on the urgent need to employ women in the armaments industries. Henrietta Heald explains how they in turn responded to the challenges.

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.