So necessary is it for us to recall from time to time that we are in an age of transition: to remember, for example, that a boy who had heard Arnold say that railways had given the death blow to feudalism, might have lived to hear Bernard Shaw say that dynamite had given the death blow to capitalism, or Bramwell at the British Association in 1881 prophesy that within the lifetime of his audience steam would have made way for internal combustion. In that audience, doubtless, there were gentlemen whose lands were still ploughed with oxen. — G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
General
Human and Animal Power
- Medieval man-powered crane used to lift stone from quarries
- A pit crane powered by two horses to bring the coal to the surface
Wind Power on Land
- Horning Mill and Sailing Boats
- Near Battersea
- Gravesend
- Near Greenwich
- Kempsford, Berkshire
- Turret Windmill in Northumbria
- Draining the Cambridgeshire Fens and Dutch Mills
Wind Power on Water
- Nineteenth-Century Ships, Boats, and Naval Architecture and Engineering (sitemap)
- Cambria — a Thames River Spritsail Barge
- Provident — a 70-foot Brixham Trawler ("the fastest, most seaworthy fishing craft ever developed in Britain")
- Clipper Ships
- The River Torridge Barge, the Tetty Boat
- Wavertree (1885), iron-hulled three-masted cargo ship
- Peking (1911), an iron-hulled four-masted bark
Water Power
- Water-Powered Drop Forge, South Yorkshire. c. 1750
- Ashford, Old Mill. Water Power in the late nineteenth century. c. 1890-1900.
Steam Power
- Steam Power (sitemap)
- Portable Steam Engine, 1828. Workshop of Maudslay, Sons & Field
- A Marine Steam Engine of 220 Horses by James Hall Nasmyth, 1832
- The Thomson Steam Turbine, 1850
- Railways
- Victorian Steam Fairs
- Coal and Coal Mining
Electricity
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Links to Related Materials
- Engineering Wonders of the Victorian Age
- Tunnels and Tunneling
- The Great Inventors
- The Contractors, Great and Not-So-Great
- Civil Engineering in the Victorian Age
- The Institution of Civil Engineers
- Power Bought at a Terrible Price: Jeremy Paxman’s Black Gold and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s’s Extraction Technologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion
Last modified 19 January 2023