GENERAL

Pavon. Orchidaceae (V 11). 30 trop. Am. Terr. Cult. orn.’ (The index of abbreviations takes up fifty-nine pages.) But this is only a fraction of the story. Taken as a whole, it must be the wittiest and most cosmopolitan, informative and gorgeous dictionary ever compiled. It will live for ever. Whether Mabberley is a man or a woman, I do not know. But if he isn’t a committee, he must have a brain the size of Andorra. No detail is too small for him (except,

LEOMCKINSTRY PIONEERS AT WORK

THEINDUSTRIALREVOLUTIONARIES: THE CREATIONOFTHEMODERNWORLD 1776–1914

★By Gavin Weightman (Atlantic Books 400pp £20)

INMODERNHISTORIOGRAPHYit has become common to see the process of industrialisation as a vast, all-powerful economic force, transforming the Western world with a ruthless inevitability. In this analysis, which owes much to Marxist determinism, the role of the individual is continually downplayed. But the historian and broadcaster Gavin Weightman has adopted a far less sweeping and impersonal approach to the Industrial Revolution. His latest book is refreshingly old-fashioned, focusing on the lives of some of the men whose work led to such dramatic changes in our society. In this lively study, there is little room for the dry academic prose that so often makes economic histories a painful reading experience. Instead, we have a wealth of vivid portraits of figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, featuring such characters as the pioneer of the electric telegraph Samuel Morse, whose eagerness for publicity was matched by his gift for engaging in feuds with rival inventors, and Hiram Maxim, developer of the machine gun and, according to the author, a bigamist with a penchant for young girls. In his concentration on the personal, Weightman not only looks at the renowned names of the Industrial Revolution (like James Watt, the cool, cautious Scot who helped to make steam power a practical reality) but also rescues some of the now-forgotten heroes of the past. One of the most striking of this neglected group is Joseph Perkins, an American born in Massachusetts in 1766 whom Weightman describes as ‘surely the most brilliantly creative inventor of his generation’. Among Perkins’s many designs were a machine for automatically cutting and heading nails, a device for stamping patterns on metal, a system for engraving banknotes, and a steam cannon. Having crossed the Atlantic after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this mechanical genius set up business

curiously, the interesting origin of larix, the larch tree). It is an unparalleled achievement of learning – and humour. Under the entry for Ficus is this: ‘... epiphytes & stranglers (with coalescing roots, some “individuals” comprising more than one genome!)’. Is that not the most refined exclamation mark ever? Can there be more than one hundred and fifty people in the entire world who get the joke? To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

in England, where he built the printing presses that turned out the world’s first postage stamps. Another pioneer too often ignored was the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick, who exploited developments in steam technology to build one of the first locomotives at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Described by Weightman as ‘a giant of a man with immense energy’, Trevithick was disillusioned by the lack of interest in his moving steam engine and moved to Peru to try to make his fortune in silver mining, leaving his wife behind in Cornwall. This enterprise, for which he had a number of Cornish pumping engines and boilers transported across the Atlantic, turned out to be a failure. In a subsequent series of adventures, he fought with Simóón Bolíívar’s army, did some pearl fishing, and was almost killed by an alligator in Colombia, before he returned to his family in 1827 after an absence of three years. At home he continued to develop the steam engine and lose money until his death in 1833. Trevithick’s was typical of the buccaneering, independent spirit shared by many of the Industrial Revolutionaries. What is particularly remarkable is how few of them had much formal education. For instance, Thomas Alva Edison, who rightly has a prominent place in the book, was from a poor family, had to leave school at twelve, and was hopeless at mathematics. Similarly, George Stephenson, the founding father of the railways, was largely self-taught. Indeed, it was the inventors’ willingness to challenge conventional wisdom which often inspired the originality of their ideas. In contrast to the orthodox Marxist emphasis on economic inevitability, Weightman also shows that some technical breakthroughs were the results of chance. So the pneumatic rubber tyre owed its inspiration to a child’s toy. The young son of John Boyd Dunlop, a Scotsman who had a large veterinary practice in Ulster, loved to race his tricycle against other boys in a public park in Belfast, but complained to his father that the rough surface of the ground slowed him down. So, in 1888, Dunlop decided to attach to the wheels a set of crude tyres made of rubber and linen cloth, blown up with a football pump. The primitive inflatable tyres were such an instant success that Dunlop had them fitted to ordinary bicycles and soon his invention had transformed road transport, though Dunlop himself made little money from it. Weightman is excellent at demolishing some of the myths

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007