Wade John.The Ingenious Victorians: Weird and Wonderful Ideas from the Age of Innovation

Pen & Sword History, 2016. — 289 p. — ISBN: 9781473849020.We all know that some of the greatest inventions came from the Victorian age, the successors of which are still with us today. But this book is not entirely about those. It s more about some of the weird and wonderful inventions, ideas and projects some successful, others less so that have largely been forgotten. Where well-known inventions or design concepts are included, it is from a perspective not previously appreciated, with details of the ingenious technology and thinking that led to their introduction and success. Here you can read how Victorian innovators were responsible for: the world s largest glass structure; an electric railway with lines under the sea and a carriage on stilts 20 feet above the waves; a monster globe that visitors could enter to see the world's land masses, seas, mountains and valleys modeled on the interior; cameras disguised as bowler hats and many other everyday objects; the London Underground as a steam railway; safety coffins designed to prevent premature burial; unusual medical uses for electricity; the first traffic lights, which exploded a month after their erection in Westminster; and the birth and rapid rise to popularity of the cinema... as well as many other ingenious inventions."
Contens
Introduction to an Era
The World’s Biggest Glass Building
The Great Exhibition
The Crystal Palace Reborn
The Great Victorian Way
When Daddy Long-Legs Ruled the Waves
James Wyld’s Monster Globe
The Biggest Camera in the World
The First Channel Tunnel
England’s Answer to the Eiffel Tower
Under, Over and Across the Thames
Shocking Cures for Every Ailment
Photographic Detectives
Frédéric Kastner’s Exploding Organ
Trains in Drains
How to Avoid Being Buried Alive
London’s Great Stink
How London Got the Needle
Phonographs, Graphophones and Gramophones
Who Really Invented the Cinema?
The Age of the Velocipede
Pneumatic Railways
The Rise and Fall of Electric Submarines
Building Big Ben
The Amazing Clocks of Charles Shepherd
From Today, Painting is Dead
Victorian Flying Machines
The People Who Invented Christmas
An Amazing Memorial and the End of an EraPicture credits