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How the Victorians took us to the Moon - Iwan Rhys Morus ****

Despite beginning and ending his book with a tale of a Victorian moonshot, Iwan Rhys Morus is not writing steam punk fiction here, but rather exploring the nature of the Victorian scientific and engineering mentality, particularly in the UK, and how that made a huge transformation possible and has continued to influence the way we do some things, up to and including the Apollo programme.

Rhys Morus goes on give us stories of the development of everything from steam railways to the telegraph, from the transformation of electricity into the power source of the world to powered flight. Many of the characters we meet will be familiar - names such as Brunel, Stephenson, Faraday (anything but typical in personality of the kind of inventor Rhys Morus is focussing on), Babbage, Edison (less than I'd perhaps expect), the Wright brothers and many more. But there are also the less familiar, for example those involved in developing and laying the transatlantic cable, an epic boys-own story of failure transformed into eventual success.

We also get a useful contrast between the often wealthy inventors and the working people who made their inventions come to life. Stories of hardship and skill in, for example, digging Victorian tunnels have often been heard before, but we also see, for example, a dispute between Babbage and the craftsman who built the constructed part of the Difference Engine, who claimed ownership of the specialist tools he developed, where Babbage believed, as it was his idea, they should be his. And another very strong thread is the connection between Victorian invention and technology and empire. Rhys Morus makes it clear that he does not approve the imperial links - though it would have been interesting to explore whether we would have the science and technology we enjoy today without this being the case.

Sometimes, Rhys Morus does suffer from the enthusiast's habit of giving too much detail about things that don't really carry the story forward - naming too many bit part players, for example - while the underlying theme of these being practical men (almost all men), with focus and discipline is perhaps repeated a bit too often. We also see too much attention given to Nikola Tesla (who Rhys Morus has written a biography of): Tesla was arguably not a typical Victorian inventor in the sense we see here, being far too flamboyant and given to fantasies. As a result, for example, Rhys Morus claims that Tesla's dream of wireless power 'came to nothing, in part at least, because Tesla refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention - that invention could never be a one-man show.' In reality those dreams came to nothing because Telsa was an excellent electrical engineer but had very little understanding of physics and his scheme could never have worked.

However, the span of the exploration of Victorian achievements (always with that underlying doubt about the tie-in to empire) is excellently handled and this was an interesting book to read.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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