Discovery and Invention
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Discovery and Invention’
Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of Bombay, shared his excitement at the way railways were making Indians more independent.
In a speech at the opening of the Bhor Ghat Incline between Bombay and Madras on April 21st, 1863, Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of Bombay, was quick to share with the assembled dignitaries his satisfaction that railways were bringing Indians an awareness of their rights and creating a more open and equal society.
Michael Faraday’s tour of Europe included a ‘picturesque’ multicultural event on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
In November 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte, smarting from his humiliating Retreat from Moscow, was waging war across Europe. This did not stop Sir Humphry Davy (who called him ‘the Corsican robber’) going to Paris to receive the Napoleon Prize, or young Michael Faraday from going with him, and afterwards they went on to the Kingdom of Naples, then under French control.
The more that pioneering engineer George Stephenson understood of the world around him, the more his sense of wonder grew.
Many Victorian scientists rebelled against the Church, at that time dominated by a colourless Calvinism that stifled wonder and mistrusted enthusiasm. But in private, many retained a powerful sense of the reality of God through wondering at his creation, as railway pioneer George Stephenson did.
George Stephenson was only too pleased to save the Government from its scientific advisers.
When a line from London to Newcastle was first planned in the 1840s, Brunel recommended an atmospheric railway, which pulls carriages along with vacuum tubes laid between the rails instead of locomotives. The decision lay with the Government’s chief engineer, Robert Stephenson, but his father George made sure the idea got no further than Robert’s outer office.
James Hargreaves’s historic invention was not without its critics when it first appeared.
James Hargreaves (?1720-1778) was one of a number of eighteenth-century Lancashire inventors who transformed textile production from a cottage handicraft into a mechanised industry. His ‘Spinning Jenny’ of 1764 cleared a bottleneck in cloth production that proved the social benefits of automation and accelerated the industrial revolution.
Samuel Smiles explains how Tudor England was transformed from sleepy backwater to hive of industry.
Samuel Smiles has been writing about England’s sluggish economy early in Elizabeth’s reign, with London acting as little more than a trading post for prosperous merchants in Amsterdam and Antwerp. Something needed to change the culture in England’s declining market towns.