This is the story of how for more than a hundred years steam power played a vital role in the development of road transport. It all began with tentative attempts to build steam carriages by pioneers such as Cugnot in France and Trevithick in Britain, and in the early part of the nineteenth century there were significant attempts to develop steam carriages and omnibuses. That these attempts ultimately failed was largely due to opposition by road authorities...

This is the story of a thousand mile-long trip around England by canal. At times the journey took the author out into the beautiful countryside, and elsewhere the canal crept round the edge of old industrial towns. It is a journey that proved full of surprises, delights and rich variety, as the book clearly demonstrates. The book illustrates the great contrasts between travelling on the wide tidal waters of the River Trent and being overtaken by...

Anthony Burton's concise and informative guide to British shipbuilding will be absorbing reading for anyone who wants to learn about its history or find out about the life of a shipbuilder and his family. In a clear and accessible way he traces its development from the medieval period to its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and on into the present day. He describes how, at the height of its powers, it was of immense importance....

This is the story of canals used for transport and the men who built them from the earliest times, up to the end of the ninteenth century. This is a very long history: stones for the pyramids of Egypt were brought to the site by canal and one of the most imposing canal systems ever built, the Grand Canal of China, was begun in the sixth century BC.Development after the end of the Roman Empire was slow, but saw the steady improvement of river navigations...

Samuel Smiles published Lives of the Engineers in 1862. The noted biographer presented his engineers as heroic progress makers who conquered nature and overcame impossible obstacles to drive the Industrial Revolution forward but included twisted and often fabricated accounts in his work. In “Ten Engineers Who Made Britain Great”, Anthony Burton seeks to correct this narrative by offering nuanced portraits of some of the best-known engineers of...

This is the story of how a change in how iron was made in the 18th century changed the world forever, and of the men and women who made it happen. The production of iron around 700BC was so important that it was called the Iron Age. This was the second Iron Age. Iron made the machines of the industrial revolution; it transformed transport with iron ships and iron trains running on iron rails; iron- framed buildings were the prototypes of the modern...

Mining is Britain's oldest industry, and this book follows the men and, in the past, women who spent their lives working underground. Since the New Stone Age various minerals have been wrested from British soil - copper, tin, gold, lead - but in later periods the key commodity was coal. Those who worked in the mines were constantly battling on two fronts: there was the continual danger of flood and explosion; and the often bitter struggles against...

This is the story of how, from modest beginnings, Britain rose throughout the 19th century to become the greatest shipbuilding nation in the world. It begins with the age of sail, then moves on to the days of iron- hulled steamers. It shows how conflicts arose between the traditional shipwrights and the new men who came from the metal industries, leading to the infamous demarcation disputes. It is also the story of men like Brunel and Armstrong, geniuses...

This is the story of the men who built Britain's canals and railways-not the engineers and the administrators, but the ones who provided the brawn and muscle. There had never been a workforce like the navvies, a great army of men, moving about the country following the work as it became available. This book will tell of their extraordinary feats of strength and their often colourful lives. They lived rough, usually having to make do with huts and...