My lockdown project that grew into an epic is finally with the publisher. It is still nameless.
It’s an interpretation of British industrialisation, mainly about the 18th century, and a lot about the iron trade. What does it say? It shows how significant collaborative working was – how much came from the workshop floor, and how people came together to achieve great things and overcome difficult conditions. E.P. Thompson was spot on with ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, and it’s not just the working class who are patronised. To appreciate the magnitude of what came out of that century we have to understand the limits of what was available to work with.
I’m also interested in how technology and science (18th-c science wasn’t overly scientific) informed one another, and advanced. It’s complicated, with benefits flowing in both directions. Chemistry learned more from iron-working than vice versa, that’s for sure. The Royal Society was more peripheral than sometimes claimed.
The bit I’m most proud of is where Arsene Wenger, Renaissance Florence and Brian Eno are all quoted on one page. It all makes perfect sense. I think…
The image is of an 18th-c. laboratory, perhaps that of the chemist William Lewis FRS.
(Wellcome Trust, Creative Commons Licence)