Science & Technology

Alex Keller describes how the closing years of the sixteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth marked the first period in England of important technological advance.

Barrie St. Clair McBride introduces Charles-Marie de la Condamine, a soldier-scholar, and one of the first European travellers to investigate South America in a genuinely scientific spirit.

Born near Leeds, a builder of bridges, canals and an inventor of mechanical equipment, George John Smeaton was an eminent forerunner of his profession.

An accomplished Latin poet, no less distinguished in “council and prudent matters of state,” an expert cartographer and an enterprising ship-builder, William Petty was a many-sided man, typical of the scientific spirit of the later seventeenth century. By K. Theodore Hoppen.

Count Zeppelin and his successors in Germany and Britain backed an invention that failed; but David Sawers describes how, during its lifetime, the airship attracted the enthusiasm of many aeronautical engineers.

John Cohen traces the ancestry of modern automation back through the curious mechanical inventions of past centuries to the twilight figures of remote mythology.

John Gage profiles Loutherbourg, the Alsatian landscape-artist who lived in London from 1771 onwards and became a creator of striking theatrical designs and seemingly miraculous exhibitions.

D.B. Quinn and P.H. Hulton describe the six voyages to American waters that John White sailed on between 1577 and 1590, and how almost all his surviving drawings are connected with exploration.

Bernard Lovell introduces a particularly striking figure in the history of science, Tycho Brahe. This princely astronomer, whose observatory took the form of a fantastic castle, made the series of precious observations from which Kepler evolved his three great laws of planetary movement.

Charles Seltman introduces Pythagoras, a man of great personal authority and astonishingly diverse gifts, who founded one of the most influential schools of philosophy in the ancient world.