Curated playlist
People of the Industrial Revolution
- Thomas HighsThomas Highs died on the 13th of December 1803, aged eighty-four, at the expense of a stranger. William Drinkwater, a Manchester cotton spinner, paid for his burial in the New Jerusalem Chapel. For years before that, Drinkwater had been…
- Abraham Darby IIAbraham Darby II was born on the 12th of May 1711 in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, into a family that would leave its mark on the early Industrial Revolution. His father, the first Abraham Darby, had already transformed the iron business by…
- John LombeJohn Lombe died in Derby on the 20th of November 1722, at around twenty-nine years old, leaving behind a half-finished story that would outlast him by centuries. He had grown up in Norwich as the son of a worsted weaver, a craftsman's…
- James Beaumont NeilsonJames Beaumont Neilson was born in Shettleston on the 22nd of June 1792, the son of a millwright who had once partnered in one of Glasgow's ironworks. Few people outside industrial history know his name. Yet the discovery he made in the…
- 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…
- 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…
- Abraham Darby IIIAbraham Darby III was born in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, on the 24th of April 1750, into a family that had already changed British industry once. His grandfather and father had pioneered iron smelting with coke. By the time he inherited…
- Claude Louis BertholletClaude Louis Berthollet spent decades arguing a point that every other leading chemist of his era believed was wrong. He was born on the 9th of December 1748 in Talloires, a small town near Annecy in the Duchy of Savoy, and he would…
- Joseph AspdinJoseph Aspdin patented something he called an artificial stone, and he named it after a quarry that most of his customers would never see. That quarry produced Portland stone, a pale limestone cut on the Isle of Portland along the Dorset…
- 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…
- Abraham Darby IAbraham Darby was born on the 14th of April 1677 in a place called Wren's Nest, in Woodsetton, Staffordshire, into a family of English Quakers. He died at the age of 40, having spent barely four decades on earth. And yet in those four…
- 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…
- Thomas SaveryThomas Savery was born around 1650 at the manor house of Shilstone, near Modbury in Devon. He received a solid education that prepared him for military engineering work. By 1702 he had risen to the rank of captain within the English…
- Richard ArkwrightRichard Arkwright was born on the 23rd of December 1732 in Preston, Lancashire, the youngest of seven surviving children in a family that could not afford to send him to school. His cousin Ellen taught him to read and write. By his…
- 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…
- Marc Isambard BrunelMarc Isambard Brunel arrived into the world on the 25th of April 1769. He was born on a family farm in Hacqueville, Normandy. His father Jean Charles Brunel was a prosperous farmer who expected his second son to enter the priesthood. The…
- 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…
- Matthew BoultonMatthew Boulton stood at the furnace of the modern world. Born in Birmingham on the 3rd of September 1728, he spent his life turning that city into something the world had never seen: a place where steam did the work of thousands of hands,…
- Robert StephensonRobert Stephenson was born on the 16th of October 1803 at Willington Quay, east of Newcastle upon Tyne, to a father who would become known to history as the Father of Railways. His mother Fanny died when Robert was just two years old. His…
- William MurdochWilliam Murdoch walked over 300 miles to ask for a job. In 1777, at age 23, he left Ayrshire on foot and arrived in Birmingham at the workshop of James Watt. He carried a hat he had turned on a lathe of his own design. The hat was made of…
- Antoine LavoisierOn the 8th of May 1794, in Paris, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was guillotined alongside 27 co-defendants, at the age of 50. According to popular legend, an appeal to spare his life so he could continue his experiments was cut short by the…
- 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…
- Humphry DavyIn 1799, Humphry Davy breathed sixteen quarts of a gas for nearly seven minutes, and it absolutely intoxicated him. He called it laughing gas, and he laughed. He was a chemist working at a medical research facility in Bristol, and he was…
- George StephensonGeorge Stephenson could not read or write until he was 18 years old. Born in 1781 to parents who were both illiterate, he grew up in a colliery cottage where there was no money for schooling. His father worked the pumping engine at Wylam…
- Henry BessemerHenry Bessemer was born on the 19th of January 1813 in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, into a family already fluent in the language of invention. His father, Anthony, had built machines for the Paris Mint, been…
- Thomas TelfordThomas Telford was born on the 9th of August 1757 on a hill farm called Glendinning, three miles east of Eskdalemuir Kirk in the rural parish of Westerkirk, Dumfriesshire. His father, a shepherd named John Telford, died shortly after…
- Charles TennantCharles Tennant was born on the 3rd of May 1768 at Laigh Corton in Alloway, Ayrshire. He was the sixth of thirteen surviving children of a farmer named John "Auld Glen" Tennant. Bales of unbleached cotton piled up in Scottish warehouses…
- 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.…
- Henry CortHenry Cort died on the 23rd of May 1800 with a government pension and a reputation as one of England's great industrial innovators, yet he died, by all accounts, a ruined man. He was buried in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead in…
- John Loudon McAdamJohn Loudon McAdam was born in Ayr, Scotland, on the 23rd of September 1756, the youngest of ten children and second son of the Baron of Waterhead. Every road you drive on today owes something to a method he developed in the early…
- 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…
- Richard TrevithickRichard Trevithick died on the 22nd of April 1833 in a hotel room in Dartford, Kent, penniless and alone. No relatives or friends had come to his bedside during his final illness. The workers at a nearby engineering firm passed a…
- John SmeatonJohn Smeaton called himself a civil engineer at a time when that phrase did not yet exist. Born on the 8th of June 1724 in Austhorpe, Leeds, he would spend his life insisting that engineering was a discipline worthy of serious scientific…
- 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,…
- Benjamin HuntsmanBenjamin Huntsman was born on the 4th of June 1704 in Epworth, Lincolnshire, the fourth child of a Quaker farming couple named William and Mary Huntsman. What that boy from a modest farming household would go on to do changed the nature of…
- Ned LuddNed Ludd never organized a single protest, wrote a single letter, or swung a hammer at a single machine. He may never have existed at all. Yet his name became the rallying cry for one of the most dramatic episodes of industrial unrest in…
- Nicolas LeblancNicolas Leblanc was born in Ivoy le Pré, Cher, France on the 6th of December 1742. His father worked as a minor official at an iron works before dying in 1751. The young boy traveled to Bourges to live with Dr. Bien, a close family friend…