Written in the 1850s for curious general readers, this survey walks through the inventions that had remade daily life within living memory: steam navigation, steam carriages and railways, the air engine, photography, dissolving-view lanterns and the electric telegraph. Bakewell explains how each device works, who devised it and how the idea grew from first experiments to practical use, with Wheatstone and Faraday among the names in his pages.
A first-hand snapshot of Victorian technology as its own contemporaries understood it, for anyone curious about the history of invention. Download the free EPUB.