John Martin from Haydon Bridge made his name painting the end of the world, so convincingly that one London gallery had to put a railing round his picture to hold the crowds back. He also [more…]
George Biddell Airy was Astronomer Royal for 46 years. He drew the line the whole world sets its clocks by, weighed the Earth from the bottom of a coal pit in South Shields and never, [more…]
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…]
The series takes its first (but not final) turn to the darker side of the North East’s historical figures. Mary Ann Cotton of Low Moorsley was the first female serial killer in British history. This [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…]
This is the first article since the railway series went into the sidings, and we are now well overdue an article on the fairer sex. So, this week we bring to you a lady who [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…]
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