History of Engineering & Technology

Did you know that the machine used to drill tunnels for the first underground railway in England was invented by a South African, or that the first...

Between 1900 and 1950, Americans built the most powerful steam locomotives of all timeenormous engines that powered a colossal industry. They were ...

Concrete: We use it for our buildings, bridges, dams, and roads. We walk on it, drive on it, and many of us live and work within its walls. But ver...

The Congo-Océan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, whe...

Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the engineering pope Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transforme...

The space race was perhaps the greatest technological contest of the 20th century. It was a thrilling era of innovation, discovery and exploration,...

An illustrated biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59), the foremost engineer in an age of great engineers, when the Industrial Revolution w...

If the twentieth century saw the rise of Big Science, then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werretts...

Why did London have to wait so long for a main-line railway beneath its streets? For a few years in the mid-nineteenth century, Isambard Kingdom Br...

In 1858 the Great Stink of London made much of the city along the Thames uninhabitable. Between 1848 and 1854 nearly 25,000 Londoners died of chole...

The String Book opens with a note about an 8,000-year-old piece of string that was found at a Stone Age settlement in England, about which the edit...

This fascinating book explores the development of locomotives over the course of fifty years. From Richard Trevithick''s first experimental road en...