Extracts from Scientific Literature

Samuel Smiles explains why the London and Birmingham Railway was an achievement superior to the Great Pyramid of Giza.

When the London and Birmingham Railway opened in 1838, it was an engineering marvel. But progress from the era of the Great Pyramids to Britain’s railways did not lie in engineering alone. It lay in the fact that the industrial revolution was an achievement not of servants gratifying a political elite, but of free men pursuing their own advantages.

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George Stephenson argued that his steam engines were solar-powered.

Today’s enthusiasts for ‘renewable energy’ have brought Britain’s once-mighty coal industry to an end. Yet judging by George Stephenson’s exchange with William Buckland, the eccentric but brilliant Oxford geologist, there may have been a serious misunderstanding...

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Great inventions come from those who notice what they see.

Scottish motivational writer Samuel Smiles held that most of the great discoveries come not from a policy of deliberate ‘invention’ but from instinctively noticing things that other people merely see.

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Samuel Smiles shows us two great achievements inspired by two tiny creatures.

Scottish motivational writer Samuel Smiles is talking about the importance of noticing what we see, and gives two notable examples of a time when Nature has been mankind’s teacher.

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A self-made man who never forgot his humble beginnings.

George Stephenson (1781-1848) was an illiterate boy from the North East, who, through his pioneering railways and steam engines, became arguably the most important civil engineer in world history.

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