Or, Why wasn’t the Telegraph Invented Earlier? A wonderful deep-dive into optical telegraphy through the ages. adactio.com/links/19635 | Continue reading
The remarkable possibilities of the Victorian-style Guarantee Fund | Continue reading
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive … | Continue reading
The other week I attended an unconference, which had a session on the implications of establishing colonies on other planets. Although this was largely meant to be about the likely impact on Earth’s natural environment — what will be the impact of extracting raw materials from as … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter, Age of Invention, on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. You can subscribe here: Patents for invention — temporary monopolies on the use of new technologies — are frequently cited as a key contributor to … | Continue reading
How mathematics transformed shipbuilding | Continue reading
One of the things I’ve been looking into lately is the maritime technology of the late sixteenth century. This is because I think it’s a crucial piece of the puzzle as to why London grew so dramatically over the course of c.1550-1650: an unprecedented, tenfold increase. | Continue reading
You’re reading my newsletter, Age of Invention, on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. It currently goes out to 3,450 people. You can subscribe here: When we measure historical economic growth, we tend to focus on living standards — ofte … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly-ish newsletter, Age of Invention, on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. You can subscribe here: On this day, in 1851, Londoners were finally allowed to enter one of the most spectacular edifices to grace their city. … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter, Age of Invention, on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. You can subscribe here: A theme I keep coming back to is that a lot of inventions could have been invented centuries, if not millennia, before they … | Continue reading
In our current age of apps, able to tell us exactly where we are in the world at any time, it’s hard to imagine an era in which most people would never have seen a map. The average English person of the mid-sixteenth century would have had little idea of the overall shape of thei … | Continue reading
What is today’s technological wonder of the world? We might point to something like the smartphone - the supercomputers that many of us carry around in our pockets - or perhaps the World Wide Web. Two decades ago, perhaps many of us would have cited Concorde (RIP). A few decades … | Continue reading
I mentioned last week how the period 1550-1650 is the crucial century in understanding the causes of the acceleration of innovation. From 1550, when England was an indisputable backwater, by the 1590s it could claim craftsmen, artists, mathematicians, and navigators of internatio … | Continue reading