An interesting book by the author of “Self-Help”, with biographies of the inventors and introducers of the screw propeller, the marine chronometer, the silk industry, the stream-printing machine and other 19th century devices.
About the author (from Wikipedia):
Samuel Smiles (23 December 1812 – 16 April 1904), was a Scottish author and government reformer who campaigned on a Chartist platform. But he concluded that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws. His masterpiece, Self-Help (1859), promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called “the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism”, and it raised Smiles to celebrity status almost overnight.