Science & Technology

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.

W.H. Chaloner offers a study in British railway engineering.

At the end of the eighteenth century the Russians were in want of technologists. Eric Robinson describes how they turned for help to the engineering skills of Birmingham.

“What is the American, this new man?,” Franklin seemed to provide the answer to this question first asked in 1784.

G.G. Hatheway describes how British-Canadian and American companies entered upon a nineteenth century contest in transatlantic crossings.

The transatlantic connection was ‘an additional bond of union’, in the words of Queen Victoria to President Andrew Johnson, which strengthened the link between Britain and the United States.