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Victorian Technology

Man is a Tool-using Animal (Handthierendes Thier). Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs, lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals [hundredweights] are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise Tools: with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron, as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools: without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all. — Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book I, Chapter 5.

General

• Ages of Technology
• Science and Technology Timeline
• Technology and Leisure in Britain after 1850
• A Review of Joseph Bizup's Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry
• Carlyle and the Institution as Technology
• Sublimity, Urbanization, and Technology
• Engineering Wonders of the Victorian Age

The Industrial Revolution

• The Industrial Revolution: An Overview
• The Industrial Revolution: A Chronology
• Science, Technology, and the Industrial Revolution: Selected Readings

Factories, Mining, and Other Heavy Industry

• A Review of Dale H. Porter's The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London
• Civil Engineering in the Victorian Age
• The Clerk of the Works
• Cotton versus Silk: Sigfried Gideon on Social Class and Mechanization
• Water-Powered Drop Forge, Sheffield, South Yorkshire
• Victorian Locks and Locksmiths

Railways, Canals, and Other Forms of Transportation

Railways

• Victorian Railways: An Overview
• British Railways compared to American Railroads
• The First Locomotives
• The Personalities of Victorian Railways
• The Social Effects of Victorian Railways
• The Victorian Railroad Station — a New Building Type
• The Death of William Huskisson
• Carlyle and Punch, on Victorian Railways

Bridges and Canals

• Canals in the U.K.
• Victorian and Earlier Bridges and Acqueducts
• London Canal Museum (UK).
• The Railway & Canal Historical Society (UK).

Ships and Shipping

• Ships, Boats, and Naval Architecture and Engineering (Overview/Sitemap)
• Thames Paddle-wheel Ferries
• Clipper ships at South-West India Dock

Printing and publishing

• Print Technology and Print Culture in the Victorian Age (overview/sitemap)
• The Victorian Book Industry: Political, Economic, and Technological Factors in the Rise of a Mass Audience
• Printing Techology and Publishing: A Selective Chronology
• The Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Illustration: Woodblock Engraving, Steel Engraving, and Other Processes
• Victorian Trade Bindings — Technology and Design
• High-Speed Printing
• Advertising and Distribution at Mid-century

Technology, Commerce, and Culture

• Nineteenth-Century Photography: A Timeline
• Commerce, Economics, Politics
  • Adam Smith, Division of Labor, and Assembly-Line Technology
  • Malthus's failure to anticipate the growth of technology
  • Military Engineers
• Architecture
  • Dilemmas created by Advancing Technology
  • The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851
• Literature
  • Literature, Science, and Technology
  • Inventions in Alice in Wonderland
  • Technological Tranformation of the Countryside within In Memoriam and Jane Eyre
  • Satire and Science in the First "Information Age"
  • The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Servant-Master Relationships
  • Masters, Men, and Industrial technology in Gaskell
  • Kipling's Interest in Contemporary Technology

Miscellaneous

• Victorian Biotech: Dr. George Merryweather's 1851 "Tempest Prognosticator"

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Last modified 7 January 2006