How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon

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Praise for NIKOLA TESLA AND THE ELECTRICAL FUTURE

[This] crisply succinct, beautifully synthesized study brings to life Tesla, his achievements and failures… and the hopeful thrum of an era before world wars – NATURE

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

The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of Empire – while revolutionizing science in the process.

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, properly disciplined, could make new worlds. As crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and other exhibitions its success inaugurated, they came to see the future made fact – to see the future being built before their eyes.

In this rich and absorbing book, the distinguished 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’s 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 rich tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took us to the Moon.

IWAN RHYS MORUS is a writer and historian of science. 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, and held research positions at Cambridge as well as the University of California San Diego and Queen’s University Belfast. He has spent much of his career working on the history of science during the long 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 (including recent popular titles such as MICHAEL FARADAY AND THE ELECTRICAL CENTURY and NIKOLA TESLA AND THE ELECTRICAL FUTURE (Icon, 2017/2019)), writes regularly for platforms such as Aeon and The Conversation and is a regular contributor to BBC radio and television.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: To be confirmed Delivery: Autumn 2022 Publication: Autumn 2023 Status: Proposal Length: 100,000 words

All rights available excluding Uk & Commonwealth (publisher to be confirmed)