There’s an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century, that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or prison for servants.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
Welcome to my newsletter, Age of Invention, on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
With many countries’ recent productivity woes, there’s been a lot of focus lately on trying to build more transport infrastructure.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
The Lands that Salt Forgot| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
Here’s a riddle. There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many a military campaign, and sometimes even a motivation for starting a war. Improvements to the preparation and uses of this product would have increased population size and would have had a general and noticeable impact on people’s living standards. And this product underwe...| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
One of my big goals for this year, as part of finally finishing my book on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, has been to get a handle on a bunch of industries of the period — ones that experienced dramatic changes especially in the period 1550-1650, but which are almost totally ignored, as well as industries where most people have a general sense of the highlights, but where actually there was a whole lot more development that’s been almost entirely neglected or forgotten.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
Today I’m making good on a promise.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
I’m excited to announce something I’ve been quietly working on for a few months now behind the scenes: the first instalment of the interactive, animated, explorable history of the steam engine.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
Writing for a public audience is a double-edged sword.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
When was the technology of the Ancient World superseded? The views from 1599 and 1715.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
The surprising rise of muscle power, the salty source of Scottish Lowlands wealth, the Dutch Republic's energy abundance, and why doesn't anybody ever talk about lime?| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
The extraordinary life of John Holker: industrialist, rebel, prisoner, fugitive, soldier, undercover agent, spy-catcher, industrial spymaster, innovation inspector, and nobleman.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
I was quite overwhelmed by the response to my last piece, on whether history has a reproducibility crisis — all the more overwhelmed because I posted it just before moving house. But I’ve been sent so many interesting things as a result of it, that I’d like to share a few of them that stood out. And to make a public commitment.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
He was born, farmed, and died at Dishley, much like his father before him. But Robert Bakewell, unlike most people, caught the improving mentality, or attitude — the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common — which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment. The improving mentality was a reframing the status quo as a problem to solve. A habit of optimisation. A compulsion to perfect.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
Anglesey, a large island off the north-west coast of Wales, has seen copper mining since ancient times.| Age of Invention, by Anton Howes
We often think of Britain’s Industrial Revolution as the advent of mechanisation. But long before the rise of the water-powered cotton mills of Lancashire, it was the medieval world that saw a dramatic expansion in the use and application of water for mechanical power.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
You’re reading my newsletter, Age of Invention, on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
The mystifying, centuries-long failure of the coal briquette| www.ageofinvention.xyz
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a machine that does the exact opposite, exploiting the apparent sucking power that occurs when hot steam is rapidly condensed with a spray of cold water. It’s the relativ...| www.ageofinvention.xyz
Back in 2011, the field of psychology went into crisis. Some of the most famous and widely-cited experimental results could not be replicated by others. These were findings published in the field’s most prestigious academic journals, and going back for decades. Since then, more and more scientific fields have turned out to have been the victims of replication crises. But what is the problem even worse in history?| www.ageofinvention.xyz
Over the course of the last day alone, four separate people have asked for my comment on an article in The Guardian. It is about some new research suggesting that Henry Cort — one of the classic inventor names of the British Industrial Revolution — stole the iron-making improvements he patented in the early 1780s from “76 black Jamaican metallurgists”, many of them enslaved.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
I’ve been reading more from the 1776 travel diary of Samuel More.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
The other week I was tipped off by a fellow researcher to the existence of some very interesting manuscripts in the British Library — the travel diaries of Samuel More, secretary to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.| www.ageofinvention.xyz
