The paddle steamer holds a unique place in the history of maritime engineering. When the engineers of the early nineteenth century experimented with steamboats they chose the paddle wheel as the form of propulsion. Within twenty years the paddle steamers were at work on inland waters and short sea passages. They were graceful, elegant ships, but in the jet age too slow and uneconomical. In the 1950s they went to the breaker’s yards in droves, and now there are only a few left. This book tells they story of the paddle steamers, and of the men who built, owned and sailed them.

A hundred years ago it was impossible to forecast with any accuracy how long a journey might take to accomplish, and the traveller by land or sea was liable to “moving accidents by flood and field”; but side by side with the growth of the steam-ship, and the accompanying increase of certainty in the times of departure and arrival, came the introduction of the railway system inland. Between the two, however, there is the fundamental difference that the sea is a highway open to all, while the land must be bought or hired of its owners; and the result of this was that inland transportation, implying a huge initial outlay on railroad construction, became the business of wealthy companies, whereas any man was free to build a steamboat and ply it where he would. The shipowner, moreover, has a further advantage in his freedom to choose his route, because he is at liberty to “follow trade”; but if, as has happened before now, the traffic of a town decreases, owing to a change in, or the disappearance of, its manufactures, the railway that serves it becomes proportionately useless. In another essential, the development of steam-transport on land and sea provides a more striking contrast. The main features of George Stephenson’s “Rocket” showed in 1830, in however crude a form as regards detail and design, the leading principles of the modern locomotive engine and boiler; but the history of the marine engine, as of the steam-ship which it propels, has been one of radical change. The earliest attempts were made, naturally enough, in the face of great opposition. Every one will remember Stephenson’s famous retort, when it was suggested to him that it would be awkward for his engine if a cow got across the rails, that “it would be very awkward—for the cow”;—and at sea it was the rule for a long while to regard steam merely as auxiliary to sails, to be used in calms. While ships were still built of wood, and while the early engines consumed a great deal of fuel in proportion to the distance covered, it was impossible to carry enough coal for long voyages, and a large sail-area had still to be provided. Progress was thus retarded until, in 1843, the great engineer Brunel proved by the Great Britain that the day of the wooden ship had passed; and the next ten years were marked by the substitution of iron for wood in shipbuilding. Thenceforward the story of the steam-ship progressed decade by decade. Between 1855 and 1865 paddle-wheels gave place to screw propellers, and the need for engines of a higher speed, which the adoption of the screw brought about, distinguished the following decade as that in which the “compound engine” was evolved. Put shortly, “compounding” means the using of the waste steam from one cylinder to do further work in a second cylinder. The extension of this system to “triple expansion,” whereby the exhaust steam is utilised in a third cylinder, the introduction of twin screws, and the substitution of steel for iron in hull-construction, were the chief innovations between 1875 and 1885. The last fifteen years of the century saw the tonnage of the world’s shipping doubled, and the main features of mechanical progress during that period were another step to “quadruple expansion” and the application of “forced draught,” which gives a greater steam-pressure without a corresponding increase in the size of the boilers. The first decade of the present century has been already devoted to the development of the “turbine” engine.

Discover one of Twentieth-Century Russia's most lauded lost classics, now in a remarkable new translation. 'Outstanding... A sparkling, supremely precious literary achievement' Telegraph 'One of the great Russian autobiographies, as fresh now as the day it was written - and the day it was lived' Julian Barnes In 1943, Konstantin Paustovsky, the Soviet Union's most revered author, started out on his masterwork - The Story of a Life; a grand, novelistic memoir of a life lived on the fast-unfurling frontiers of Russian history. Eventually published over six volumes, it would cement Paustovsky's reputation as the voice of Russia around the world, and see him nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Taking its reader from Paustovsky's Ukrainian youth, struggling with a family on the verge of collapse and the first flourishes of creative ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on Russia's frontlines and then as a journalist covering the country's violent spiral into revolution, The Story of a Life offers a portrait of an artistic journey like no other.

Published in 1898, a two-volume biography of a Victorian electrical engineer who was an early pioneer in submarine cable telegraphy.

In 1829 he mounted a private expedition to search for the passage, during which he became trapped in the Canadian Arctic and survived a four-year ordeal of isolation and hardship. He proved that whatever his shortcomings as an explorer, he could never be accused of lacking courage.

These 10 History Lessons cover the programs of study for Key Stage 1 History as set out in the National Curriculum and are also based around the QCA topics Homes, Toys, Florence Nightingale, Fire of London and Guy Fawkes. Within each lesson are opportunities to develop chronological understanding, knowledge and understanding of events, people and changes in the past, historical interpretation and enquiry. Each lesson includes an historical account of the person's life or event, a list of resources and practical activities, lesson objectives, outcomes and extension activities for cross curricular work that include ICT opportunities as well as assessment.

In August 1812 Henry Bell’s Comet, a revolutionary paddle steamer, made her first journey on the Clyde. This marked the start of extraordinary developments that completely transformed shipping and transport in Britain, Europe and the Americas. The paddle steamer soon became the key link with Empire, pushing the Honourable East India Company’s wooden walls off the seas; it provided the all- important link with the Americas, and it offered emigrants to the New World a means of pushing westwards. In this fascinating new book Nick Robins analyses the remarkable impact of the paddle steamer and goes on to describe its development, both in terms of technology design and in relation to its effects on the transformation of nineteenth-century economies. He includes all Henry Bells disciples - the Burns brothers, Laird, Napier, Fulton, Syminton Cunard and Denny to name a few, and looks at their individual contributions. The impact of the paddle steamer on transport is difficult to overstate. It helped with the export of cotton from the American southern states, and with the transport of oil from Burma’s oil fields. The great stern wheelers of the Mississipi are legendary, but they also migrated to the Murray and Darling rivers in Australia, and to the Congo and Nile rivers in Africa, and the great rivers of Russia. This wonderful story of nineteenth-century ingenuity will appeal to shipping enthusiasts and those with a wider interest in industrial history.

The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens's Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the nineteenth century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens's work. The advent first of stage coaches, then of railways and transoceanic steam ships made unprecedented round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized, 'standard' time, which now ticks on our clocks. Jonathan Grossman examines the history of public transport's systematic networking of people and how this revolutionized perceptions of time, space, and community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it all. Focusing on a trio of road novels by Charles Dickens, he looks first at a key historical moment in the networked community's coming together, then at a subsequent recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which passengers came to imagine their journeying in the network.