Known for muck and brass, the grim north of England was formerly a hotbed of the Industrial Revolution, rich in sweat, resources, enterprise and plutocrats. Nowadays synonymous with grim decline, my wife and I have [more…]
Before George Stephenson’s name ended up on everything, a colliery manager from Newburn settled the one argument that decided whether railways would ever work. He won it with a hand-cranked cart, two iron engines, and [more…]
Born in the same village as George Stephenson, 5 years earlier. The man who saved the Stockton and Darlington when the engines kept breaking down. The man who built Russia’s first locomotive… and then vanished [more…]
Everyone knows George Stephenson. The self-taught genius who invented railways. Except he didn’t, really. George was the visionary, the man who saw what steam could do. But the man who actually designed the engines, surveyed [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…]
A Sunderland chemist beat Edison by a year, accidentally invented synthetic fabric, lit up the world’s first electrically-powered street, and still got written out of history. It’s time to set the record straight. If you [more…]
A solicitor-turned-engineer who built the world’s first smart home, sold weapons to everyone, championed solar power, and became the richest man in Britain. Sound familiar? If you pitched Lord Armstrong’s life story to a Hollywood [more…]
After a rather extended respite hiatus, welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends… wending our way through the elements and the Groups of the Periodic Table (a.k.a. the Periodic Table of the [more…]
Now I’m no greenie, no time for all that net-zero nonsense and Mad Ed’s delusions, but I do have green tech, because it suits me and my particular circumstances. I have solar panels and 16kwh [more…]
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