Gold was discovered in the Transvaal. ibid.
In the long reign of a single Queen Britain changed the world and was itself utterly transformed. Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837; by the time she died in 1901 we had built the modern world. It was a time of outstanding engineering, remarkable innovation, all of it driven by ambitious pioneers. It shaped the country we live in today. Michael Buerk, How the Victorians Built Britain s1e1: How Britain Got Moving, Channel 5 2018
A radical new transport system was carved out of London; how engineers wrestled to run steam trains underground … ibid.
A new rival vehicle came to London … The rails that carried the trams were slightly raised above the roads. Everything changed in 1868: a company in Liverpool obtained a local act to introduce tram lines to their city … A horsedrawn tram could pull up to fifty passengers. ibid.
Britain was in the grip of a public health catastrophe … The main cause was dirty water and raw sewage. How the Victorians Built Britain s1e2: Saving the Nation’s Health
A sophisticated network of pipes and tunnels beneath our streets – the sewers. ibid.
Construction began on Newlands’ Liverpool sewer in 1849 … The pioneering sewer took 21 years to complete. ibid.
Bazalgette’s scheme didn’t just change the shape of London, he’d eradicated diseases like cholera for ever, and had transformed the lives of London’s inhabitants. ibid.
The Victorians harnessed the power of gas and electricity for the home … Domestic appliances became the must-have items of the day. How the Victorians Built Britain s1e3: The Making of the Modern Home
In the 60 years of her reign the population of Britain doubled. ibid.
Gas street lighting spread out from London across the rest of the country. ibid.
The Great Exhibition was the very first international presentation of manufactured products. It was organised by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and held in a purpose-built crystal palace in Hyde Park. ibid.
Cotton changed the world … The fearless team of engineers and industrialists brought the sea to landlocked Manchester. How the Victorians Built Britain s1e4: The Birth of the Machines
Manchester: It was packed full of dark Satanic mills, churning out cotton by the millions of square metres. ibid.
Cotton could now be transported from Liverpool docks to Manchester in two hours … The world’s first intercity railway. ibid.
Huge feats of engineering were needed to conquer an unforgiving route. The Manchester to Liverpool railway was the first to tunnel beneath the city, the first to have signals, the first to have a timetable, the first to carry mail … It had to transport all that cotton to and from Manchester’s factories and mills. ibid.
At its peak, the Lancashire cotton industry had over 250,000 powered looms. ibid.
The mill workers lived a grim life. ibid.
They built one of the wonders of the modern world … the Manchester Ship Canal. ibid.
The impact that the railways had on Victorian Britain was unlike anything seen before in engineering history. And it was the same in the cloth manufacturing industry. 10 Ways the Victorians Changed Britain, Channel 5 2023
At its peak the Lancashire cotton industry had over 250,000 powered looms. ibid.
Cholera was the disease Victorians feared most. ibid.
These stunning feats of engineering serve to remind us of the debt that we owe to the Victorians who built Britain. ibid.
The demand for new highways and bridges was huge. ibid.
An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen. Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion
‘The man who discovered how to power the world ... was James Watt, and his steam engine was to drive the industrial revolution.’ James Dyson, cited Genius of Britain II: A Roomful of Brilliant Minds, Channel 4 2012
Brunel himself was knocked unconscious and washed all the way back to the tunnel of the central shaft. Great Britons s1e1: Brunel, Jeremy Clarkson, BBC 2002
The Greatest Britain of all time. ibid.
At the heart of this extraordinary transformation is one man: Isambard Kingdom Brunel ... The Clifton Suspension Bridge ... The Great Western Railway … the Bristol & Exeter Railway … Taft Vale … South Devon … Cornwell … the Bristol & Gloucester ... Brunel built modern Britain. ibid.
Enormously bold and heady engineering ... He combined form and function to completely transform our landscape. ibid.
He realised he was running the greatest show on Earth. ibid.
He wanted to give Bristol something exotic ... Ancient Egypt – so that was the route he took. Designing it was one thing, but building it was something else. ibid.
Brunel was left dangling two hundred feet above Avon ... He had cheated death for a second time. ibid.
In London he was building another suspension bridge over the Thames, the tunnel underneath it was inching along, he was also doing the docks in Sunderland, designing his first ship, and he got married … ibid.
He began work on what was to become the Great Western Railway. ibid.
Brunel wanted his tracks seven feet apart ... The larger the wheel the less the friction ... Fit the big wheels and then put the carriage between them ... A lower centre of gravity, you’ve got better dynamics ... and something that changed the world – more speed. ibid.
A bridge with two enormous hundred-and-twenty-foot arches ... All the experts said it would collapse ... It’s still the widest, flattest brick arch in the world: a beautiful bridge. ibid.
He proposed a tunnel: two miles long ... He built this exquisite, elaborate and very expensive facade but inside it was unlined ... The opening of the Box Tunnel meant a straight and level run from London to Bristol in four hours, thirteen hours faster than the mail coach. ibid.
Brunel’s Temple Meads Terminus. It is impossible to over-stress the importance of the Great Western Railway ... Brunel’s railway changed our expectations, it changed our aspirations, it changed everything. ibid.
Crossing the Atlantic: he’d had an idea, a big one as usual: he wanted people to catch the train in London, get off in Bristol, and then board a steam-ship bound for New York. ibid.
He came up with this the SS Great Britain – the biggest ship the world had ever seen. Not just the biggest either, she was the first ocean-going liner to be made from iron, and the first to have a propeller instead of paddle wheels. ibid.
Everything about the Great Britain was gigantic ... You should see his idea of a spanner! ibid.
On just her fifth trip to New York she ran aground off Ireland ... She was sold ... Dumped on the Falkland Islands ... This was the most advanced ship in the world and look what they did to her. ibid.
A modern propeller designed by a computer in the twenty-first century is only five percent more efficient than this propeller which was designed by a Victorian bloke in a tall hat. ibid.
1843 ... He was still only thirty-seven. The crowing glory of the Great Western Railway: Paddington Station. ibid.
There was an air of indestructibility to everything he built. ibid.
The launch pad for the biggest, more impressive, most astonishing engineering feat probably ever ... the Great Eastern ... a leviathan. ibid.
Brunel has scripted another East End soap opera ... The launch: thousands came, but the ship was too heavy to budge. Brunel felt publicly humiliated. Finally, they got her to float and the problems really started ... On her maiden voyage there were only thirty-eight passengers ... The leviathan became a transatlantic cable-layer. ibid.
Brunel didn’t even live to see the ship sail. ibid.
Darwin told the world where we had come from but Brunel had done something so much more important: he took us to where we were going. ibid.
The year is 1640. A gentleman farmer in East Anglia has so far lived his life in obscurity. But now at the age of 40 he is on the verge of greatness. Great Britons s1e4: Cromwell, Richard Holmes
To the horror of Charles I parliament began making assertions and pushing for a series of measures that challenged the authority of the King and the established Church. But Charles wouldn’t back down. ibid.
The two armies drew up on either side of this low valley ... Here in the middle there were more than 10,000 men shooting and stabbing at each other. ibid.
The army was increasingly mistrustful of parliament ... They published demands for liberty, justice and freedom from tyranny. ibid.
Once again England descended into civil war, and Cromwell gave up the complexities of politics to return to the simple loyalties of battle. He won a series of victories and emerged even more convinced that God was on his side. ibid.
On 20th January 1649 King Charles I was put on trial in Westminster Hall. ibid.
Early on 30th January 1649 King Charles I walked through the Banqueting House at Whitehall and stepped through a first floor window on to a great scaffold. ibid.