Curated playlist
English inventors
- Daniel BournDaniel Bourn secured a patent in 1748 for a carding machine with rotating cylinders, placing him at the edge of one of the most consequential industrial shifts in British history. At a moment when textile production was still largely done…
- James HargreavesJames Hargreaves was an illiterate hand loom weaver from Stanhill, Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, and yet his name is attached to one of the most consequential inventions of the Industrial Revolution. He is credited with inventing the…
- Lewis PaulLewis Paul died in 1759, but his story began much earlier with a family steeped in medicine and faith. His father served as the physician to Lord Shaftesbury, placing the young inventor within a circle of influence and education. This…
- Robert Kay (inventor)Robert Kay was born in 1728. Everything that made him worth remembering happened inside a machine most people rarely look at closely, the weaving loom. His contribution eventually earned a name of its own, the drop box, a piece of…
- John RoebuckJohn Roebuck of Kinneil died in Edinburgh on the 17th of July 1794, but he left behind a world his own hands had helped build. He was a physician who never stopped practising chemistry, an industrialist who bankrolled a struggling…
- Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton said his mother told him he was so small at birth that he could have fit inside a quart mug. He was born prematurely on Christmas Day, the 25th of December 1642, at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. His father, also named…
- John Kay (flying shuttle)John Kay entered the world on the 17th of June 1704 in the Lancashire hamlet of Walmersley. His father Robert owned the Park estate there before dying before his son was born. As the fifth son out of ten children, John received only £40…
- Richard Roberts (engineer)Richard Roberts was born on the 22nd of April 1789 in Llanymynech, a village on the border between England and Wales. His father was a shoemaker who also kept the New Bridge tollgate. Biographer Richard Leslie Hills later called Roberts…
- Henry MaudslayHenry Maudslay was born on the 22nd of August 1771, the fifth of seven children, in a family that lived in a narrow alley off Beresford Square in Woolwich. His father, a wheelwright in the Royal Engineers, had been wounded in action. That…
- Samuel CromptonSamuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, a machine that could produce thread far finer than any human hand had ever managed. He was born on the 3rd of December 1753 at 10 Firwood Fold in Bolton, Lancashire. For five or six years, he…
- Henry FourdrinierHenry Fourdrinier was born on the 11th of February 1766, into a family that already knew the texture of paper intimately. His father was a paper maker and stationer. His grandfather was the engraver Paul Fourdrinier. Yet the name Henry…
- Robert HookeRobert Hooke died in London on the 3rd of March 1703, alone in his room at Gresham College, blind and bedridden. When his belongings were searched, a chest was found containing £8,000 in money and gold. His library held over 3,000 books in…
- Alan TuringAlan Turing once chained his tea mug to a radiator pipe at Bletchley Park so it could not be stolen. In the first week of every June he cycled to the office in a service gas mask, fending off hay fever pollen. His bicycle chain slipped at…
- Josiah WedgwoodJosiah Wedgwood was baptised on the 12th of July 1730, the thirteenth and last child of a Staffordshire potting family, in a village where every pot-works owned a single bottle kiln. By the time he died he had been called "among the…
- Joseph BramahJoseph Bramah was born on the 13th of April 1748, the second son of a farmer in South Yorkshire, and he died on the 9th of December 1814 at a forest in Hampshire, felled by a cold he caught while overseeing his own invention uprooting…
- Edmund CartwrightEdmund Cartwright is the name behind a machine that a Manchester mill owner never got to finish installing. In 1790, Robert Grimshaw built a weaving factory at Knott Mill in Gorton, planning to fill it with 500 of Cartwright's power looms.…
- Joseph WhitworthJohn Street in Stockport, Cheshire, marked the birthplace of Joseph Whitworth on the 21st of December 1803. The site now holds a blue plaque on the back wall of the Stockport Courthouse. His father Charles worked as a teacher and…
- Matthew MurrayMatthew Murray was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1765, and he left school at fourteen with no particular distinction to his name. He spent his early years as an apprentice to a blacksmith or whitesmith, learning to work metal by hand. Yet…
- Edmond HalleyEdmond Halley is remembered for a comet he never saw. He predicted its return in 1758, sixteen years after his death at the age of 85, and the comet was named after him when it appeared right on schedule. But the comet is only a fraction…
- John Wilkinson (industrialist)John Wilkinson was born in 1728 in the small settlement of Little Clifton, Bridgefoot, Cumberland, the son of an iron founder who stoked his blast furnace with coke at a time when most men still used charcoal. By the end of his life,…
- Clement ClerkeSir Clement Clerke died in debt in 1693, owing money to lords, merchants, and moneylenders across England. The source of his troubles was rarely a lack of ambition. He was the third son of George Clerke of Willoughby, Warwickshire,…