Energy and Empire is a definitive biographical study of Lord Kelvin, the most famous mathematical physicist of nineteenth-century Britain. As part of this study, it delivers on a speculation long entertained by historians of science, that Victorian physics expressed in its very content the industria[...]
Engineers are empire-builders. James Watt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson and a host of lesser known figures worked to build and expand personal and business empires of material technology founded on and sustained by durable networks of trust and expertise. In so doing these engineers an[...]