Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914
The author of some fine business histories, including Signor Marconi’s Magic Box (2003), Weightman elevates his game in this work. Skeptical of theoretical explanations of the Industrial Revolution, he highlights entrepreneurs behind inventions symbolic of the world’s transformation from agrarianism to manufacturing. Beginning with innovators of iron smelting and winding up with the founders of the chemical industry, Weightman profiles the often-obsessed personalities whose technical advances made watching capitalists take notice and invest. His narrative of the iron story sets the tone: it depicts the man who introduced coke into the smelting process, which rendered previous methods obsolete, and whose effusion of business schemes earned him the sobriquet John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson. Indeed, eccentricity seems a common trait in Weightman’s cast of characters, which perhaps explains the persistence of a Robert Fulton, who failed for years until his steamboat succeeded, or the audacious claim of a painter to be the inventor of the telegraph. Integrating lively biography with technological clarity, Weightman converts the Industrial Revolution into an enjoyably readable period of history. --Gilbert Taylor