A Monument to Liberty
Samuel Smiles explains why the London and Birmingham Railway was an achievement superior to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
1838
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Samuel Smiles explains why the London and Birmingham Railway was an achievement superior to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
1838
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
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.
abridged
THE Great Pyramid of Egypt was, according to Diodorus Siculus, constructed by 300,000 — according to Herodotus, by 100,000 — men. It required for its execution twenty years, and the labour expended upon it has been estimated as equivalent to lifting 15,733,000,000 of cubic feet of stone one foot high.*
Whereas, if the labour expended in constructing the London and Birmingham Railway be in like manner reduced to one common denomination the result is 25,000,000,000 of cubic feet more than was lifted for the Great Pyramid; and yet the English work was performed by about 20,000 men in less than five years.
And whilst the Egyptian work was executed by a powerful monarch concentrating upon it the labour and capital of a great nation, the English railway was constructed, in the face of every conceivable obstruction and difficulty, by a company of private individuals out of their own resources, without the aid of Government or the contribution of one farthing of public money.
abridged
These figures come originally from the work of Peter Lecount (1794-1852), an assistant engineer of the London and Birmingham Railway who also wrote a history of the line. He was a former Naval officer, and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society active in scientific research for the Board of Longitude.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Which required more men to built it, the railway or the Great Pyramid?
The pyramid, requiring five times the number.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is a tomb. It was built for the Pharaoh Khufu [Cheops]. It was built in about 2580-2560 BC.