Images

Battle of Castiglione, 5 August 1796, during Napoleon's Italian Campaign, oil on canvas by Victor Adam, 1836. Palace of Versailles.

A photograph of a macadamised road taken in the 1850s. The macadamised road, that is, a hard and relatively smooth road surface made using two layers of stones (one aggregate layer and a top layer of very small stones), was first made on...

A Donkin tin can. The commercially viable tin can that preserved food was invented in 1811 by Bryan Donkin (1768-1855). Donkin built on the ideas of others to perfect a cheap and safe canning process. The idea was that soldiers, mariners...

Portland cement silos in Washington, USA. Portland cement was a fast-setting cement invented in 1824 by the Yorkshireman Joseph Aspdin (1778-1859). Aspdin created the cement through experimentation when he discovered that a heated mixture...

A 19th-century advertisement for a lawnmower. The lawnmower was invented by Edwin Budding in England in 1830. The machine replaced the much slower and more expensive process of cutting grass by hand using a scythe. Budding was inspired by...

A model of the pedal bicycle invented by the Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan (1812-1878) in 1839. There had been earlier two-wheeled vehicles, but these were not powered by turning the pedals with one's feet. Macmillan's bicycle...

A hypodermic syringe made by Coxeter and Son of London c. 1860. Syringes were used in antiquity, but the true hypodermic syringe for injecting precisely measured liquids using a hollow needle was invented by the Scotsman Alexander Wood (1817-1884...

A cotton gin (machine), invented by Eli Whitney (1765-1825) in the United States in 1794 during the Industrial Revolution. The machine was used to clean raw cotton and separate it from sticky seeds by pulling the cotton balls through a comb...

The Education of Achilles, oil on canvas by Auguste-Clément Chrétien, 1861.

A sculpture of Chiron and Achilles by Rinaldo Rinaldi, 1817. Cortile della Ca' d'oro, Venice.