INTRODUCTION
For the people of the nineteenth century, the age of invention began with
single indelible public moment, the opening of the Liverpool and Manches
ter Railway in 1830. Writing in 1847, the end of the first decade of Quee
Victoria’s reign, a Victorian workingman recalled:
The time I first saw the railway uniting Liverpool and Manchester …
stands, as I have said, in memory, like an epoch in my life. I looked
upon that most poetical and most practical of the grand achievements
of human intellect, until people thought I stood and slept; and, when
they heard the dream, they said it was very dreamy, indeed. I should
fear to tell the dreams which I have now beside the electric telegraph,
and on the railways, and within the regions of the god-like inventors
and makers of machinery. There is a time coming when realities shall
go beyond any dreams that have yet been told of these things.… of
the moral electricity … to carry the instantaneous message of one
feeling, one interest, one object, one hope of success from the lordly
end, to the working man’s end of the social
world.1
On that September day in 1830, thousands of spectators, workingme
with cloth caps, middle-class men in black suits, and women in bonnet
lined the rails stretching between the manufacturing city of Mancheste
and the port of Liverpool to cheer a sight never before seen. Along iro
rails on iron wheels a contrivance consisting of a large round barrel shap
with the word Rocket on the side came chuffing along the rails at th
speed of seventeen miles per hour. From the barrel a tubular pipe ros
