Gavin Weightman (Estate)

The story of Daniel Sutton, a forgotten medical revolutionary.

Tracing the long pre-history of five twentieth-century inventions which have transformed our lives, Gavin Weightman reveals a fantastic cast of scientists and inspired amateurs whose ingenuity has given us the airplane, television, bar code, personal computer, and mobile phone.

Tracing the long pre-history of five twentieth-century inventions which have transformed our lives, Gavin Weightman reveals a fantastic cast of scientists and inspired amateurs whose ingenuity has given us the airplane, television, bar code, personal computer, and mobile phone. Not one of these inventions can be attributed to a lone genius who experiences a moment of inspiration. Nearly all innovations exist in the imagination before they are finally made to work by the hard graft of inventors who draw on the discoveries of others.

While the discoveries of scientists have provided vital knowledge which has made innovation possible, it is a revelation of Weightman’s study that it is more often than not the amateur who enjoys the “eureka moment” when an invention works for the first time. Filled with fascinating stories of struggle, rivalry, and the ingenuity of both famous inventors and hundreds of forgotten people, Weightman’s captivating work is a triumph of storytelling that offers a fresh take on the making of our modern world.

Restoration Home goes on an extraordinary journey of discovery with six new owners of crumbling listed buildings, as they restore them into beautiful 21st Century homes, and uncover, layer by layer, a rich and detailed history of the house and its former occupants.

In the early 1870's a nighttime view over Britain would have revealed towns lit by the warm glow of gas and oil lamps and a much darker countryside, the only light emanating from the fiery sparks of late running steam trains. However, by the end of this same decade,Victorian Britons would experience a new brilliance in their streets, town halls, and other public places. Electricity had come to town. In Children of Light, Gavin Weightman brings to life not just the most celebrated electrical pioneers, such as Thomas Edison, but also the men such as Rookes Crompton who lit Henley Regatta in 1879; Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, a direct descendant of one of the Venetian Doges, who built Britain’s first major power station on the Thames at Deptford; and Anglo–Irish aristocrat, Charles Parsons inventor of the steam turbine, which revolutionized the generating of electricity. Children of Light takes in the electrification of the tramways and the London Underground, the transformation of the home with "labor saving" devices, the vital modernizing of industry during two world wars, and the battles between environmentalists and the promoters of electric power, which began in earnest when the first pylons went up. As Children of Light shows, the electric revolution has brought us luxury that would have astonished the Victorians, but at a price we are still having to pay.

The story of the 19th-century ice trade, in which ice from the lakes of New England – valued for its incredible purity – revolutionised domestic life around the world.

In this vivid, sweeping history of the industrial revolution, Gavin Weightman shows how, in less than one hundred and fifty years, an unlikely band of scientists, spies, entrepreneurs, and political refugees took a world made of wood, powered by animals, wind, and water, and made it into something entirely new, forged of steel and iron, and powered by steam and fossil fuels. Weightman weaves together the dramatic stories of giants such as Edison, Watt, Wedgwood, and Daimler, with lesser-known or entirely forgotten characters, including a group of Japanese samurai who risked their lives to learn the secrets of the West, and John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson, who didn’t let war between England and France stop him from plumbing Paris. Distilling complex technical achievements, outlandish figures, and daring adventures into an accessible narrative that spans the globe as industrialism spreads, The Industrial Revolutionaries is a remarkable work of original, engaging history.

On their original publication, the four volumes of The Making of Modern London were hailed as innovative and riveting histories of the city, combining living memory with diligent historical resarch. Accompanying a popular television series of the same name, The Making of Modern London was a ground-breaking publication and drew upon the extensive knowledge and expertise of leading academics of the day.

Now skilfully woven into one volume, this new publication picks up the story in 1815, when London was the gas-lit, horse-drawn city of Charles Dickens' day. In the two centuries that followed London has become one of the greatest cities in the world, with a history that is endlessly fascinating and enduring, especially when it is related in the words of the people who lived and breathed the city - from the lightermen on the 19th-century River Thames and the debutantes who jitterbugged their way around the dancefloors of the 1930s, to the East Enders whose poignant memories of the air raids and bombings of the Second World War stir our emotions even today. And this is one of the few histories of the capital that records the excitement of the Coronation in 1953, the 'Swinging London' of the 1960s and the revolution in dress and habits from the 1970s onwards. Written with verve, sympathy and elan, this is the intimate story of London as never told before.

The world at the turn of the twentieth century was in the throes of "Marconi-mania"-brought on by an incredible invention that no one could quite explain, and by a dapper and eccentric figure (who would one day win the newly minted Nobel Prize) at the center of it all. At a time when the telephone, telegraph, and electricity made the whole world wonder just what science would think of next, the startling answer had come in 1896 in the form of two mysterious wooden boxes containing a device one Guglielmo Marconi had rigged up to transmit messages "through the ether." It was the birth of the radio, and no scientist in Europe or America, not even Marconi himself, could at first explain how it worked…it just did. And no one knew how far these radio waves could travel, until 1903, when a message from President Theodore Roosevelt to the king of England flashed from Cape Cod to Cornwall clear across the Atlantic.Here is a rich portrait of the man and his era-and a captivating tale of science and scientists, business and businessmen. There are stories of British blowhards, American con artists-and Marconi himself: a character par excellence, who eventually winds up a virtual prisoner of his worldwide fame and fortune.

A history of London as reflected by the Thames traces the river's long-standing role as a key component of British commerce, in an account that covers a range of topics from waterside architecture and the lives of local residents to the river's wildlife and its ecological issues.

BBC Two's "Restoration Home" goes on an extraordinary journey of discovery with six new owners of crumbling listed buildings, as they restore them into beautiful 21st Century homes, and uncover, layer by layer, a rich and detailed history of the house and its former occupants. These stories are fascinating, but what lies behind your own front door? What secrets are held in your own four walls? This official companion to the TV series provides all the information you need to take your own home back in time, to discover who built it, how it was used, and even how it looked. It how to use maps to track the changing landscape of your area; how to identify the style of your home and when it was built; and, detailed information on key resources, including maps, censuses, deeds and Post Office directories, and a photographic checklist of architectural features.

On February 13, 1806, the brig Favorite left Boston harbor bound for the Caribbean island of Martinique with a cargo that few imagined would survive the month-long voyage. Packed in hay in the hold were large chunks of ice cut from a frozen Massachusetts lake. This was the first venture of a young Boston entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who believed he could make a fortune selling ice to people in the tropics.

Ridiculed at the outset, Tudor endured years of hardship before he was to fulfill his dream. Over the years, he and his rivals extended the frozen-water trade to Havana, Charleston, New Orleans, London, and finally to Calcutta, where in 1833 more than one hundred tons of ice survived a four-month journey of 16,000 miles with two crossings of the equator. The Frozen Water Trade is a fascinating account of the birth of an industry that ultimately revolutionized domestic life for millions of people.