Bøger af Gavin Weightman

The extraordinary and often bizarre story of an amateur inventor and how his "magic box" changed the world

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.) 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.

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 England's 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.

A timely history of the neglected figure of Daniel Sutton--the medical revolutionary who paved the way for present-day vaccination

In 1885, W. T. Stead published an account of a girl of thirteen being sold by her mother to a brothel where her virginity would be highly prized. The story of the GBP5 virgin was a sensation, one of the greatest scandals of the Victorian era. But soon the story began to unravel...

Provides the information you need to take your own home back in time, to discover who built it, how it was used, and even how it looked. This title includes: how to use maps to track the changing landscape of your area; how to identify the style of your home and when it was built; and, detailed information on key resources.

International in its sweep, vivid in its execution and original in its argument, this 'meticulous and fascinating' (Guardian) account of the worldwide industrial revolution.