Nonfiction · 1884
Men of Invention and Industry
Smiles profiles a set of British inventors and industrialists — men who built new machines, materials, or manufacturing processes largely through persistence rather than formal training — continuing the argument he'd been making across his career that self-directed effort, not birth or education, was the real engine behind Britain's industrial rise.
Smiles published Men of Invention and Industry in 1884, a year after he edited and published James Nasmyth's autobiography — the same argument about persistence over privilege that ran through nearly everything Smiles wrote.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1884 text exactly as Samuel Smiles wrote it.
Contents
- Note
- Preface
- Chapter I — Phineas Pett: Beginnings of English Ship-Building
- Chapter II — Francis Pettit Smith: Practical Introducer of the Screw Propeller
- Chapter III — John Harrison: Inventor of the Marine Chronometer
- The preamble of the Act of Parliament in question runs as follows
- Chapter IV — John Lombe: Introducer of the Silk Industry Into England
- Chapter V — William Murdock: His Life and Inventions
- Chapter VI — Frederick Koenig: Inventor of the Steam-Printing Machine
- Chapter VII — The Walters of the Times: Invention of the Walter Press
- Chapter VIII — William Clowes: Introducer of Book-Printing by Steam
- Chapter IX — Charles Bianconi: A Lesson of Self-Help in Ireland
- Chapter X — Industry in Ireland: Through Connaught and Ulster, to Belfast
- Chapter XI — Shipbuilding in Belfast—Its Origin and Progress
- Chapter XII — Astronomers and Students in Humble Life:
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1812–1904 · Victorian
Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) was born in Haddington, Scotland, trained as a physician, and worked as a newspaper editor and railway administrator before finding lasting fame as a writer. Self-Help (1859), expanded from a series of lectures to a mutual improvement society of working men, argued that individual character, diligence, and perseverance — not birth or privilege — were the true engines of personal and national progress, illustrated throughout with brief biographical sketches of engineers, inventors, and self-made men; it became one of the best-selling books of the Victorian era and gave the English language its enduring sense of the phrase "self-help." He followed it with further books in the same vein, including Lives of the Engineers, a multi-volume study of the era's great civil engineers. He died in London at ninety-one.
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