How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon

IWAN RHYS MORUS

Strange new machines, novel ways of communicating over vast distances, thinking automata and the dream of flight…

The Victorians saw the future as an undiscovered country, ripe for exploration and colonization. To get us there, they created a new way of transforming nature, built on grand designs and imperial resources – and in doing so revolutionized science.

With their expert culture of accuracy, precision and standardization, they created telegraphs and telephones, electric trams and railways, built machines that could think and devised engines that could reach for the skies. When Cyrus Field’s audacious plan to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic finally succeeded in 1866, it showed how science could make new worlds. As crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition of 1851, they witnessed the future being invented before their eyes.

In this rich and absorbing book, historian of science Iwan Rhys Morus tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage’s dream of mechanizing mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s tunnel beneath the Thames, and from George Cayley’s fantasies of powered flight to Nikola Tesla’s visions of an electrical world, it is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures – a vibrant tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took us to the Moon.

Iwan Rhys Morus is a professor of history at Aberystwyth University in Wales. He has a degree in natural sciences and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science, both from the University of Cambridge. He has spent much of his career working on the history of science during the nineteenth century, including the development of new electrical technologies, the popular culture of science, and the history of ideas about the relationship of electricity and the human body. He has authored, co-authored or edited ten books and is a regular contributor to radio and TV. He lives in Wales.

AGENT

Peter Tallack

PUBLISHER

Grove Atlantic

PUBLICATION

14 March 2023

LENGTH

320 pages

RIGHTS SOLD

• World English (Grove Atlantic)

REGAN PENALUNA

A moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally, told through one woman ’s own search for beauty and truth

As a young woman growing up in small-town Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy, aiming to become a self-determined person living a life of the mind. Instead, the culture surrounding the discipline in American universities ground her down through its misogyny, its harassment, its devaluation of women and their intellect. Where were the women philosophers in the Western philosophical canon?

One day, in an obscure monograph, Penaluna came across Damaris Cudworth Masham’s name. The daughter of philosopher Ralph Cudworth and a contemporary of John Locke, Masham wrote about knowledge and God, and the condition of women. Masham’s work led Penaluna to other remarkable women philosophers of the era: Mary Astell, who moved to London at the age of 21 and made a living writing philosophy; Catharine Cockburn, a philosopher, novelist and playwright; and the better-known Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote extensively in defence of women’s minds.

In HOW TO THINK LIKE A WOMAN, Regan Penaluna blends memoir, biography and criticism to tell the stories of these four women who rekindled her love of philosophy and awakened her feminist consciousness.

Regan Penaluna is a writer and journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. Previously, she was an editor at Nautilus magazine and Guernica, where she wrote and edited long-form stories. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a PhD in philosophy from Boston University.

AGENT

Peter Tallack

PUBLISHER

Basic Books

PUBLICATION

27 September 2022

LENGTH

272 pages

RIGHTS SOLD

• World English (Basic Books)

• Netherland (Ten Have)

• Spain (Planeta)