The lunar men
Subtitle: five friends whose curiousity changed the world
By: Jenny Uglow.
Edition: 1st American ed.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 588
Subjects: Lunar Society of Birmingham (England); Inventors -- Great Britain -- Biography; Scientists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Inventions -- Great Britain -- History; Science -- Great Britain -- History
Genres: Biography.
Description: "In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the English Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the center of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world.

Among them were the ambitious toymaker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; and the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor, and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles). Later came Joseph Priestly, discover of oxygen and fighting radical.".

"With a small band of allies - the chemist James Keir, the doctors William Small and William Withering (the man who put digitalis on the medical map), and two wild young followers of Rousseau, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Thomas Day - they formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham, so called because it met at each full moon, and kick-started the Industrial Revolution.

Blending science, art, and commerce, the Lunar Men built canals; launched balloons; named plants, gases, and minerals; changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms; and plotted to revolutionize its soul."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Originally published in 2002 by Faber and Faber, Great Britain as: The lunar men : the inventors of the modern world, 1730-1810.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 509-558) and index.