Sir Joseph Paxton not only designed the venue for the Great Exhibition of 1851, he embodied the festival’s most cherished principles.
A twelve-year-old girl from Lyme Regis made a historic discovery while selling seashells to tourists.
The Ladies’ Diary
A long-lived annual of riddles, rhymes and really hard maths aimed specifically at Georgian Britain’s hidden public of clever women.
At fifteen John Dalton was a village schoolmaster in Kendal; at forty he had published the first scientific theory of atoms.
Railway enthusiast, music lover, and the man who gave us stereo sound.
William Hyde Wollaston discovered new elements and helped Faraday to greatness, all from the top of a tea-tray.
Faraday’s work on electromagnetism made him an architect of modern living, and one of Albert Einstein’s three most revered physicists.
The Lessons of Nature
Samuel Smiles shows us two great achievements inspired by two tiny creatures.
Great inventions come from those who notice what they see.
The Music of the Spheres
Sir William Herschel not only discovered Uranus and infrared radiation, but composed two dozen symphonies as well.
An improbable chain of coincidences led to one of the great medical revolutions just when it was most needed.
Sir Humphry Davy
A Cornish professor of chemistry with a poetic turn who helped make science a popular fashion.
The Fleming Valve
A Victorian children’s book inspired the birth of modern electronics.
The Ladder with Twenty-Four Rungs
The Duke of Argyll was pleasantly surprised to find one of his gardeners reading a learned book of mathematics - in Latin.
A Man called ‘Beta’
For a perennial ‘runner-up’, Eratosthenes had a peculiar knack of being first.
John Logie Baird
Baird’s inventions didn’t always work as well as his televisions.
Edmond Halley will forever be associated with the
comet named after him, but his greatest achievement was getting Sir Isaac Newton to publish ‘Principia Mathematica’.
The Star that Winked
John Goodricke’s observations of Algol won him the Copley Medal
while still in his teens, despite his disability.