Victorian Inventions 0719550068, 9780719550065, 9780719528965

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VICTORIAN INVENTIONS Leonard de Vries The nineteenth century was the great age of scientific invention, the age of Bell, Edison, Eiffel, and Roentgen; any reader, whether scientist or not, will relish the brilliant documentation in the contemporary text and pictures that this book provides, not only of the lasting discoveries but also of the more ephemeral inventions. Nearly all the inventions we use in our everyday life date from the period 18651900—for example, the typewriter (1867), the telephone (1876), the phonograph (fore¬ runner of the record player) (1877), the electric incandescent lamp (1879), and before the end of the century, the automobile, the electric streetcar and train, x-rays, the cinema, and wireless telegraphy. Victorian Inventions is an account of inventions at the moment of experiment, showing the ingenious ways the inventors applied the exciting new principles, and the enthusiasm of the public in sampling the results. It is divided into five sections: Transport, Electricity, Optics, Telephone, and Miscellaneous. Transport includes the most amazing bicycles—even for traveling through the air —tricycles whose tires printed slogans on the road, a locomotive for streetcar tracks in the shape of a horse, “so as not to frighten the horses in the street,” pneumatic railways, and the craziest of flying machines. The other sections follow the development of electric light and power, high tension experiments and x-rays, telescopes, photo¬ graphic cameras and cinematography, tele¬ phony, wireless telegraphy, the phonograph, the typewriter, and a rich variety of less practical but most ingenious devices. Victorian Inventions will certainly stir admiration for the pioneering efforts of our Victorian ancestors with their traveling staircases and tapis roulants. They were ecstatic about their slot machines. They projected advertisements onto clouds. They tried to make rain by bombarding clouds with explosives carried by balloons. They made phonographic dolls as toys for their children, they painted miles of material to make huge moving panoramas, discovered how to electroplate their dead, brought Turkish baths into the home, and organized telephone concerts. They developed machines for “sensation” emotions and they invented television but never saw it. The work of Leonard de Vries is widely known in England, where his many books and anthologies have been published. He is an avid collector of nineteenth-century magazines, from which he compiled this volume. Mr. de Vries lives in Amsterdam. jacket design by Mirja de Vries

American Heritage Press, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N. Y. 10020. Printed in Great Britain

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