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…]
May I introduce you to my giant spot? It sits in the middle of my forehead and, upon closer inspection, seems to consist of a little stream, some flowers and a tree. Might it be [more…]
In 2007 I was the joint owner of a building services consultancy which undertook the mechanical and electrical design and production tender documentation relating to new construction and refurbishment projects. In addition, we also undertook [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…]
You may be surprised to learn that a working time machine has already been invented in County Durham. It exists because one man refused to let the region throw its own history into the skip. [more…]
This is a warts an’ all musing upon the particular medical state I find myself in as I approach my 86th Birthday. As a soi-disant shortarse (I have lost c. 3 inches in height over [more…]
HS2 is one project. What happens everywhere else, across the hundreds of councils and public bodies that spend the rest of the £1.23 trillion, is in many ways worse. In the financial year 2022–23, 467 [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…]
Copyright © 2026 | MH Magazine WordPress Theme by MH Themes