Collingwood was the other admiral at Trafalgar. He was the first into the fight, took charge of the whole fleet after Nelson’s death and brought every British ship through the storm that followed. He was [more…]
It’s getting near the end of the original planting of potatoes. The original idea was to do a second planting, in between the rows that had already been lifted, to (hopefully) provide fresh spuds into [more…]
Thomas Bewick redrew every bird in Britain on blocks of boxwood the size of a beer mat, hid some very rude jokes in the margins of a natural history book, and created fingerprints 80-odd years [more…]
In 1826 a Stockton chemist scraped a dirty stirring stick across a rough hearth and invented the friction match. He sold fire by the tin for a shilling, refused to patent the idea and told [more…]
A final journey into history to meet three men whose names never sadly made it into popular memory but who, like all the others, laid the foundations still used by the railways to this day. [more…]
He taught Robert Stephenson his trade, judged the Rainhill Trials, and wrote the first proper book on railways, the one that engineers across the world actually used. Not all of us can be gallivanting around [more…]
George Stephenson gets the statues. But a plain-dressing Quaker wool merchant from Darlington put up the money, drove the Act through Parliament, and hired Stephenson in the first place. He helped found the world’s first [more…]
He started working life down a pit age six, ran half the coalfield by his thirties, and built an entire harbour to spite his rivals. They called him the King of the Coal Trade, and [more…]
He couldn’t read his own name until he was 18. Then he built the technology that shrank the planet. George Stephenson was born in a two-room cottage in Wylam, Northumberland, on 9 June 1781. There [more…]
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