The Industrial Revolutionaries
The Making of the Modern World, 1776–1914
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Descripción editorial
"Anyone with a passing interest in economic history will thoroughly enjoy" this account of how industry transformed the world (The Seattle Times).
In less than one hundred and fifty years, an unlikely band of scientists, spies, entrepreneurs, and political refugees took a world made of wood and powered by animals, wind, and water, and made it into something entirely new, forged of steel and iron, and powered by steam and fossil fuels.
This "entertaining and informative" account weaves together the dramatic stories of giants such as Edison, Watt, Wedgwood, and Daimler with lesser-known or entirely forgotten characters, including a group of Japanese samurai who risked their lives to learn the secrets of the West, and John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson, who didn't let war between England and France stop him from plumbing Paris (The Wall Street Journal).
"Integrating lively biography with technological clarity, Weightman converts the Industrial Revolution into an enjoyably readable period of history." —Booklist
"Skillfully stitching together thumbnail sketches of a large number of inventors, architects, engineers, and visionaries. . . . Weightman expertly marshals his cast of characters across continents and centuries, forging a genuinely global history that brings the collaborative, if competitive, business of industrial innovation to life." —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rather than an impersonal juggernaut, the British industrial revolution presented in this sprightly, if overly busy, study is the very human endeavor of inventors, engineers, craftsmen and entrepreneurs. Historian Weightman (London River) surveys the 19th-century development of the railroad, steel, oil, automobile and chemical industries and the evolution of marvels from the steam engine to electric lighting. There are few geniuses or breakthroughs the author says, for example, Thomas Edison excelled more at public relations than at mechanical innovation. Rather, this is a long slog through oft-forgotten pioneers. In Weightman's telling, industrialization proceeded through trial-and-error, hard-won expertise, laboriously amassed financing and the outmigration of technology and know-how from Britain. (He visits the industrial espionage demimonde that flourished when Britain vainly outlawed the export of technical secrets and skilled craftsmen.) The larger picture, and Weightman's too-sketchy accounts of technical innovations, sometimes get lost in the microhistory of prototypes, business startups, patent disputes and extraneous human interest (the singing von Trapp family, we learn, descended from the inventor of the torpedo.) Lacking the sweep and adventure promised in its epic title, Weightman's anecdotal narrative presents a realistically small-scale view of industrial progress. Illus.
