GAVIN WEIGHTMAN

Without the Thames there would be no London. From earliest times, the needs of the city - whether for stone, gold or coal, for hay to feed livestock or food, or wine and spices for human beings - were supplied from the river, as the fierce tides brought ships upstream or carried them down again. Only with the age of trunk road and rail did London s global importance as a port diminish. Even after that the tides continued to drive the great power stations.This fascinating book is the best possible introduction to the water and its ways, the buildings that line the banks, and the people who lived by the river, their customs and ancient knowledge. The Thames is here in every guise - highway and barrier, source of power and source of life, place of entertainment, port, and drainpipe.

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 Britains first major power station on the Thames at Deptford; and Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Charles Parsons inventor of the steam turbine, which revolutionised the generating of electricity.Children of Light takes in the electrification of the tramways and the London Underground, the transformation of the home with labour saving devices, the vital modernising of industry during two world wars, and the battles between environmentalists and the promoters of electric power, which began in earnest when the first pylons went up. As Children of Light shows, the electric revolution has brought us luxury that would have astonished the Victorians, but at a price we are still having to pay.

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.In the days before artificial refrigeration, it was thought impossible to transport ice for long distances. But one man, Frederic Tudor, was convinced it could be done. This is the story of how, almost single-handedly, and in the face of near-universal mockery, he established a vast industry that would introduce the benefits of fresh ice to large parts of the globe.Thanks to Tudor, the American fashion for drinks on the rocks spread to tropical areas such as the West Indies and British India. By the 1830s fleets of schooners carried the frozen cargo, packed with sawdust and tarpaulins for insulation, to all corners of the world. The harvesting of the ice from New Englands lakes employed thousands of men.The frozen water trade had a profound influence on the tastes of a large part of the world, but with the development of artificial cooling systems in the first quarter of the 20th century, the huge industry established by Frederic Tudor vanished as if it had never been.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

The intriguing story of how wireless was invented by Guglielmo Marconi and how it amused Queen Victoria, saved the lives of the Titanic survivors, tracked down criminals and began the radio revolution. Wireless was the most fabulous invention of the 19th century: the public thought it was magic, the popular newspapers regarded it as miraculous, and the leading scientists of the day (in Europe and America) could not understand how it worked. In 1897, when the first wireless station was established by Marconi in a few rooms of the Royal Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, nobody knew how far these invisible waves could travel through the ether, carrying Morse Coded messages decipherable at a receiving station. (The definitive answer was not discovered till the 1920s, by which time radio had become a sophisticated industry filling the airwaves with a cacaphony of sounds most of it American.) Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.Marconi himself was the son of an Italian father and an Irish mother (from the Jameson whiskey family); he grew up in Italy and was fluent in Italian and English, but it was in England that his invention first caught on. Marconi was in his early twenties at the time (he died in 1937). With the new telegraphy came the real prospect of replacing the network of telegraphic cables that criss-crossed land and sea at colossal expense. Initially it was the great ships that benefited from the new invention including the Titanic, whose survivors owed their lives to the wireless.

La Revolución Industrial se presenta normalmente como la historia de las máquinas o del implacable proceso de innovación que arranca del pensamiento científico forjado en el Siglo de las Luces. Este apasionante libro se centra en los entusiastas personajes que contribuyeron con sus innovadoras ideas a transformar el mundo. El autor nos presenta a una sucesión de pioneros geniales, mentes inquietas, inventores visionarios, brillantes ingenieros, industriales emprendedores y hábiles artesanos, incluyendo a personajes fundamentales como Watt, Edison, Trevithick, Stevenson, Wedgwood, Daimler o Bessemer y a otros menos conocidos pero igualmente fascinantes.