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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 GENERAL

of the Industrial Revolution. I was intrigued to read, for example, that the first public lighting system using electric bulbs was installed not by Edison in the USA, as is often claimed, but in the more prosaic setting of Godalming in Surrey, using bulbs invented by Joseph Swan, a chemist from Northumberland. The book abounds in telling details. It was also interesting to learn that parts of the boots used by British soldiers during the Peninsular War were actually made of clay to give them a more solid appearance, but they turned to liquid mud during the rainy campaigns. For all its depth, there are some odd omissions. I was surprised that there was almost nothing about the discovery of manned flight, certainly the most far-reaching of all inventions in the Edwardian age. Nor is there much about radio, the subject of one of Weightman’s previous books. And at

times I felt that the author could have provided more direct quotations from contemporary diaries or records to illuminate his characters and give more variety to the text. The book inspires a feeling of nostalgia for the industrial culture that Britain has lost in recent decades. Again and again, Weightman stresses that our nation was at the forefront of the revolution, almost a century ahead of France in terms of technological development. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a symbol of that enormous self-confidence, when British engineering dominated the world. Yet today, unlike almost every other major developed economy, we have hardly any home-grown manufacturing capacity left. The 1851 Exhibition displayed our industrial greatness, the 2000 Millennium Dome our national hollowness. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37

MICHAELCOREN THE BIG SMOKE

CHURCHILL’S CIGAR

★By Stephen McGinty (Macmillan 213pp £12.99)

ASFREUDTHEfraud famously said, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. He was right. And a thin monograph about Churchill’s life seen through the mist of tobacco smoke is sometimes, well, just a thin monograph about Churchill’s life seen through the mist of tobacco smoke. The problem is that there just isn’t enough to say about the great man’s Cuban habit. Mind you, the author certainly tries. The most tenuous connections are explored, from the chronological chain of ownership of the various shops where Winston bought his cigars to the bureaucratic correspondence concerning wartime cigar gifts and whether they were politically acceptable or even physically dangerous. These attempts during the war years to protect the Prime Minister from poisoning make up the most enjoyable part of the book – a delightful combination of the comical and the grotesque, as quintessentially British security agents argue whether they should simply dump all of the cigar gifts or have them tested for toxins. They invariably decided on the latter, but scientists in laboratories could only learn so much and it was left to loyal guards to smoke a random selection from each box. What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? It’s disarming to remember how many people were willing to risk their

life for someone they genuinely saw as the leader of the free world. And Stephen McGinty makes this point particularly well. Churchill was the magician of hope, his cigar the wand. So he waved it around for effect, chewing on it and sometimes not even smoking the thing at all. It was a limb of defiance, used to make points in Cabinet meetings and certainly exploited to show the difference between free democracy and non-smoking, non-drinking Hitlerism. The book is also rather good on Churchill followers who went to bizarre lengths to collect even the butts of his cigars. Not as dumb an idea as it seemed, with even the most flimsy memorabilia selling for vast amounts of money. The author also celebrates the sheer magnitude of his subject, the lust for life and all of its grand possibilities. The cigar was part of that cacophony of relish. Big, bombastic, smelly, and damn the consequences. McGinty is delightful in his conclusion, where he tours Chartwell and describes the myriad cigars and cigar boxes that are on display. The house, he explains, is now a National Trust building and thus aggressively smoke-free. The author retreats to the garden. ‘After the third attempt the match flared,’ he writes, ‘my cigar caught and smoke once more began to perfume the air.’ Try as it does, however, the book still gives us little that is not found in the admittedly enormous biographical work that already exists, and Churchill’s Cigar never manages to escape the feeling that it is just another chronicle, this time with an emphasis on nicotine. Seldom more than a pleasing distraction and sometimes straining to justify its theme, it is far more likely to satisfy the cigar monomaniac than the Churchill enthusiast. To borrow and twist old Freud again, sometimes a nice idea ought to remain just a nice idea. To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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