Over the past few weeks I’ve been swotting up on English inventors in the early seventeenth century. Curiously, it’s a period that’s often entirely neglected in accounts of the causes of the British Industrial Revolution. The public might recognise the names of later scientists and inventors, from Hooke, Newton, and Boyle in the late seventeenth century, to the likes of Jethro Tull and John Harrison in the early eighteenth. Yet I doubt they could name many innovative figures who were prominent earlier. Somehow, histories that focus on invention almost always seem to start with the founding of the Royal Society, in the early 1660s.
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Age of Invention: The Tools of Absolutism
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Over the past few weeks I’ve been swotting up on English inventors in the early seventeenth century. Curiously, it’s a period that’s often entirely neglected in accounts of the causes of the British Industrial Revolution. The public might recognise the names of later scientists and inventors, from Hooke, Newton, and Boyle in the late seventeenth century, to the likes of Jethro Tull and John Harrison in the early eighteenth. Yet I doubt they could name many innovative figures who were prominent earlier. Somehow, histories that focus on invention almost always seem to start with the founding of the Royal Society, in the early 1660s.