Courage in The Twentyfirst Century

The spectacular structures of today, such as large suspension bridges, are the result of scientific principles established during the new iron age of the nineteenth century. The book is concerned with a detailed and critical account of the development and application of those principles (including statics and elasticity) by people of remarkable talent in applied mathematics and engineering. They were, of course, mainly motivated by the demands of the railway, construction boom. Among the outstanding examples chosen by the author is Robert Stephenson's use of novel principles for the design and erection of the Britannia tubular iron bridge over the Menai Straits. A History of the Theory of Structures in the Nineteenth Century is a uniquely comprehensive account of a century of the development of the theory; an account which skilfully blends the personalities and the great works and which is enlivened by little-known accounts of friendship and controversy.

An authoritative popular history that places the state in regional and national context.

London in the eighteenth century was a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666 that had destroyed half its homes and great public buildings. The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and large-scale projects, of rapidly changing culture and commerce, as huge numbers of people arrived in the shining city, drawn by its immense wealth and power and its many diversions.