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Now in paperback, the fascinating story of America's vast natural ice trade which revolutionized the 19th century. On February 13, 1806, the brig Favorite left Boston harbor bound for the Caribbean island of Martinique with a cargo that few imagined would survive the month-long voyage. Packed in hay in the hold were large chunks of ice cut from a frozen Massachusetts lake. This was the first venture of a young Boston entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who believed he could make a fortune selling ice to people in the tropics. Ridiculed at the outset, Tudor endured years of hardship before he was to fulfill his dream. Over the years, he and his rivals extended the frozen-water trade to Havana, Charleston, New Orleans, London, and finally to Calcutta, where in 1833 more than one hundred tons of ice survived a four-month journey of 16,000 miles with two crossings of the equator. The Frozen-Water Trade is a fascinating account of the birth of an industry that ultimately revolutionized domestic life for millions of people.
“Anyone with a passing interest in economic history will thoroughly enjoy” this account of how industry transformed the world (The Seattle Times). In less than one hundred and fifty years, an unlikely band of scientists, spies, entrepreneurs, and political refugees took a world made of wood and powered by animals, wind, and water, and made it into something entirely new, forged of steel and iron, and powered by steam and fossil fuels. This “entertaining and informative” account weaves together the dramatic stories of giants such as Edison, Watt, Wedgwood, and Daimler with lesser-known or entirely forgotten characters, including a group of Japanese samurai who risked their lives to le...
In this 'Who Do You Think You Are?' for buildings, homeowners turn detective as they set about the process of restoring their newly acquired ruins, treating the property as a character in history.
While the discoveries of scientists have provided vital knowledge which has made innovation possible, it is more often than not the amateur who enjoys the "eureka moment" when an invention works for the first time. Weightman tells fascinating stories of struggle, rivalry, and the ingenuity of both famous inventors and hundreds of forgotten people, and offers a fresh take on the making of our modern world.
The world at the turn of the twentieth century was in the throes of "Marconi-mania"-brought on by an incredible invention that no one could quite explain, and by a dapper and eccentric figure (who would one day win the newly minted Nobel Prize) at the center of it all. At a time when the telephone, telegraph, and electricity made the whole world wonder just what science would think of next, the startling answer had come in 1896 in the form of two mysterious wooden boxes containing a device one Guglielmo Marconi had rigged up to transmit messages "through the ether." It was the birth of the radio, and no scientist in Europe or America, not even Marconi himself, could at first explain how it w...
In the early 1870s a night-time view over Britain would have revealed towns lit by the warm glow of gas and oil lamps and a much darker countryside, the only light emanating from the fiery sparks of late running steam trains. However, by the end of this same decade that Victorian Britons would experience a new brilliance in their streets, town halls and other public places. Electricity had come to town. In Children of Light, Gavin Weightman brings to life not just the most celebrated electrical pioneers, such as Thomas Edison, but also the men such as Rookes Crompton who lit Henley Regatta in 1879; Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, a direct descendant of one of the Venetian Doges, who built Brita...
The story of the 19th-century ice trade, in which ice from the lakes of New England – valued for its incredible purity – revolutionised domestic life around the world.
On their original publication, the four volumes of THE MAKING OF MODERN LONDON were hailed as innovative and riveting histories of the city, combining living memory with diligent historical resarch. Accompanying a popular television series of the same name, THE MAKING OF MODERN LONDON was a ground-breaking publication and drew upon the extensive knowledge and expertise of leading academics of the day.Now skilfully woven into one volume, this new publication picks up the story in 1815, when London was the gas-lit, horse-drawn city of Charles Dickens' day. In the two centuries that followed London has become one of the greatest cities in the world, with a history that is endlessly fascinating ...
The latest in the popular What theDid For Us series of books, What the Industrial Revolution Did For Us is a journey back in time, giving the reader an insight into how British life was transformed between 1750 and 1830, and how it shaped the world we live in today. So what did the Industrial Revolution do for us? Without the huge advances in science, engineering and medicine and the cast of extraordinarily colourful inventors and scientists who revolutionised the way we think, our modern world would be very different. We would be without vaccinations against contagious diseases and have no anaesthetics for surgery. The industrial revolution also gave birth to our national obsession with tea...
A little over a century ago, the world went wireless. Cables and all their limiting inefficiencies gave way to a revolutionary means of transmitting news and information almost everywhere, instantaneously. By means of "Hertzian waves," as radio waves were initially known, ships could now make contact with other ships (saving lives, such as on the doomed S.S. Titanic); financial markets could coordinate with other financial markets, establishing the price of commodities and fixing exchange rates; military commanders could connect with the front lines, positioning artillery and directing troop movements. Suddenly and irrevocably, time and space telescoped beyond what had been thought imaginabl...