About this book

My book Enquiring Minds and Ingenious Mechanics takes you through the discoveries and inventions of Britain’s Industrial Revolution through 57 biographies that originally appeared in an engraving and a book.

Some were “gentlemen”, a few were “nobility”, most were self-taught “common men” who dragged themselves up by their own bootstraps to give us the technological world we now live in. Many of them came from a non-conformist religious background.

 The biographies are grouped into themes of, The air we breath, The clothes we wear, Makers of new machines, Makers of the modern world and Discovering he world.

How many were there? 51, 53, 55, 57?

The book has additional sections about the different versions of the engraving and the revisions of the book. It also unravels the mystery of the missing pictures from the engraving and the missing biographies from the book. However they are included in this version. Also some people were changed for others in both the engraving and book. Intriguingly one subject has his back to us, now why was that?

A common approach

The book has an extensive Bibliography, List of References, Glossary and Index and over 70 illustrations. For each subject the reader gets a thumbnail sketch giving some basic facts about them such as dates and places of birth. Other facts are made accessible by using info-graphics rather than text to show  PLACES, PEOPLE and TIMES for each person.