The XIX century is an age of discoveries and this is an informative, well researched, and entertaining book about the people and the organisations.
Well told and interesting.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

In How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon, Iwan Rhys Morus makes the illuminating point that one of the most important things that happened in Victorian times was a change in thinking. “Just fifty years earlier, most people assumed that the future would simply be an extension of the past.” This realisation that men could shape the future by imagining how it could be different and then inventing stuff to make that future happen.

A cornerstone of the scientific establishment during the early 1800s was the Royal Society. Sir Joseph Banks was president for more than forty years and he had used his position and the power it gave him to ensure that only people like him were acknowledged as scientists and only their inventions had merit. This really constrained progress: Charles Babbage, for example, designed the first computer in the 1840s. If a more enthusiastic Royal Society had championed his cause and ensured he had the funding to build his ‘Analytical Engine’, the world might have seen the benefits of computers seventy years earlier.

A significant part of the book covers the politics of the Victorian scientific world: the jockeying for positions of power within the Royal Society; the formation of various other societies; the rivalry between inventors working in the same field. I’m afraid that this part is not terribly exciting and my attention did wander. Whether any or all of the Geological Society, the Astronomical Society and the Society for Animal Chemistry succeeded or failed is not information that I retained beyond reading Chapter One – sorry!

However, the book is good in many other respects, especially at showing us how scientists needed to be commercial and to have practical skills. Henry Wilde improved magneto-electric machines in the 1860s – yawn. Henry Wilde showed how his improved machine could melt an iron bar – wow! Another great scientist, Nikola Tesla, didn’t fulfil his full promise because he “refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention – that invention could never be a one-man show.” I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to study science beyond GCSE-level, as it emphasises the need to keep one foot in the real world and to think about what that science means to the layperson and how to explain it to them.

#HowtheVictoriansTookUstotheMoon #NetGalley

It’s a pretty interesting take on the legacy of Victorian science, and I like this kind of melting pot between pop science and history.

Facsinating book. Well written and researched, a absolute must read for any interested in history, Victorian era science and the people that made the modern world.