Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science

The second son of a fireman to one of the colliery engines, who had six children and a wife to support on an income of twelve shillings a-week, George Stephenson had to begin wo...

Smeaton commenced the undertaking by visiting the rock in the spring of 1756, accurately measuring its very irregular surface, and in order to ensure exactness in his plans, mak...

Joseph Marie Jacquard, the inventor of the loom which bears his name, and to whom the extent and prosperity of the silk manufacture of our time is mainly due, was born at Lyons...

Mr. Hill asked himself whether there was no means of lessening the cost of postage, whether the government could not afford to charge a lower rate, or manage to get the work don...

in a fraction of the time, and with a fraction of the cost and peril of the old mode of naval locomotion. How amply realized has been James Bell's prediction more than half a ce...

In his walk along the beach, the nature of the air contained in the bladders of sea-weed was a constant subject of speculation with him; and he used to sigh over the limited lab...

The core of the machine consists of a large drum, turning on a horizontal axis, round which revolve ten smaller cylinders, also on horizontal axes, in close proximity to the dru...

When the subject of a grant to the inventor of the spinning-mule was brought up in the House a few days afterwards by Lord Stanley (now Lord Derby), only L5000 was proposed. No...

It was about the year 1818 that Thomas Gray of Nottingham, travelling in the north of England, happened to visit one of the collieries. As he stood watching a train of loaded wa...

In tracing this lineage of inventive genius, we next come to Thomas Newcomen, a blacksmith, who carried out the principle of the piston in his Atmospheric Engine, for which he t...

The use of the fly-shuttle greatly expedited the process of weaving, and the spinning of cotton soon fell behind. The weavers were often brought to a stand-still for want of wef...

He made another effort, engaged a potter to assist him, giving the clothes off his own back to pay him, and afterwards receiving aid from a friendly neighbour, and this time pro...

Great was the excitement in New York as the time drew nigh when the _Sirius_ was considered due. For days together the Battery was crowded with anxious watchers, from the first...

"Of myself, I trust I may be excused when I say, that the highest object of my ambition has ever been an extensive usefulness; and my line of life--my turn of mind--my dispositi...

The land telegraph having had such success, the next step was to carry the wires across the deep, and link continent to continent,--an all-important step for an island kingdom s...

There is a curious, but not very well authenticated story about a visit Fust made to Paris to push the sale of his Bibles. "The tradition of the Devil and Dr. Faustus," writes D...

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CHURCH OF ENGLAND SUNDAY-SCHOOL MAGAZINE.--"_With A. L. O. E.'s well-known powers of description and imagination, circumstances are described and characters sketched, which we b...