influential engineering business in the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and revolutionised the application of power in industry. Boulton was born at Birmingham in the English midlands, where [...] vases. Boulton met James Watt in 1768 and took a share in his patent for the separate condenser, then lobbied the government successfully to extend it by more than a decade. In 1775, he and Watt created their [...] of industrial efficiency, quality control and systematic production. In the 1770s, he introduced a pioneering health insurance scheme for workers, funded by compulsory contributions from wages. In the

James McGuffog, a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire, before spending time in the retail trade in London and Manchester. He was appointed manager in 1792 of a mill in Manchester in which 500 people were employed [...] of the Industrial Revolution, a successful and philanthropic factory owner, a pioneer of co-operation and a thinker who inspired socialist movements in many countries. He was born in Newtown in mid-Wales [...] at Orbiston in Scotland in 1825-29, Manea Fen in Cambridgeshire in 1838-9, and Harmony Hall, Queenswood, East Tytherley, Hampshire, in 1840-45. Owen withdrew from the New Lanark partnership in 1829, set

watches. In 1811, after making improvements to a pumping engine that was not working properly, he was put in charge of all the engines belonging to an alliance of coal owners in north-east England. In his thirties [...] Hetton Colliery Railway in 1822 and in 1825 the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which he designed from the start to use locomotives and wrought-iron edge-rails. With his son Robert in 1823 he set up an e [...] the world. Railways evolved during the industrial revolution from precursors in the Middle Ages. However, Stephenson’s Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830 is considered the first modern main-line

increasingly important during the Industrial Revolution as industries such as cotton manufacturing and papermaking grew rapidly. In traditional bleaching, materials were laid in sunlight to whiten or disinfect [...] on cotton production. In 1788 he started a bleaching field at Darnley, on the edge of Glasgow, where he and his partners boiled cloth in a weak alkali solution then placed it in daylight. They began e [...] public railways in Scotland, the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway (opened 1831), which allowed him to cut the costs of delivering coal to his works. His process remained the principal one in use to make bleach

about the mechanised textile industries in several parts of Europe and took his knowledge to Łodz in Poland. The factory he built there in 1855 was one of the biggest in the world, covering 168 hectares. The [...] The population of Łodz as an industrial city grew from 18,000 in 1851 to 100,000 in 1878. It became one of the most important textile manufacturing cities in Europe. Łodz was a traditional area for hand-made [...] cotton to expand. Scheibler grew up in Moschau in the Rhineland. His family for several generations were entrepreneurs in the textile industry. He took an apprenticeship in Belgium at a textile factory at

tolerances in vertical boring machines. Maritz made solid castings, that were rotated by water-power in horizontal machines, in which the cutters were advanced through gearing by hand wheels. In the early [...] operations in cannon foundries, which have been published, are amongst the most important pictorial records of 18th century industrial operations. Jan Verbruggen played an important role in transmitting [...] to the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. His 3-story brick house of 1772-3 is preserved at the Woolwich Arsenal, and his guns are displayed in military collections in Europe and North America.

published in 1867. He maintained links with revolutionaries in many countries, particularly through the First International, formed in 1864. His analysis of economic history, that industrial capitalism [...] revolutionary rising in June of that year, about which he wrote an incisive pamphlet. He moved to London in the following year and remained there for the rest of his life, living in relative poverty with [...] it as stimulating, but his vision of a future in which communist revolution would be followed by the withering away of the state has materialised neither in those states that have adopted a supposedly Marxist

In the early nineteenth century Karl Godulla (or Karolus Godula) was a pioneer of the industrial revolution in Silesia - then in Prussia but today part of Poland. He developed mining for coal and zinc [...] zinc in the region and built the largest industrial empire of the period in the German states. Godulla’s family were farmers in Upper Silesia and he attended grammar schools at Rudy (now in Poland) and Opava [...] Opava (now in Czechia). In 1801 he was given a job on the estates of Count von Ballestrem. He was promoted several times until, in 1809, he became treasurer of the estates. In 1812 he was responsible for

pioneers of the industrial revolution in southern Spain. He was an industrialist and entrepreneur who played a central role in the early industrial development of the region of Málaga. Born in 1786 at Rabanera [...] the wealthiest businessmen in Spain. In the last years before his death in 1846, his other industrial interests included the San Andrés lead smelter at Adra, Almería, which he developed into a successful [...] Gibraltar and made great profits by exporting graphite. In 1813 he married Isabel Livermore Sallas, the daughter of a British merchant in Málaga. In 1826, Heredia founded a company with partners to establish

water-powered cotton-spinning mill, in which he had a 20% share, which attracted attention from all over Europe. The Cromford Mill site, which probably began to work in 1774, was powered by the Bonsall Brook [...] The mill was extended, and in 1780 Arkwright bought land for another mill complex powered by the Derwent itself. Masson Mill, as it came to be called, was built in brick, in contrast with the plain local [...] producing increasing amounts of cotton cloth. Arkwright took a close interest in the improvement of spinning machinery. In 1768 he moved to Nottingham, where he formed a partnership to develop the spinning

the chemist and entrepreneur John Roebuck influenced important developments in the British Industrial Revolution, particularly in the manufacture of sulphuric acid, iron production and the invention of the [...] acid, for which there was increasing demand. Roebuck developed a new method to make it in large lead-lined chambers, which was more economical than existing processes. He and Garbett decided in 1749 to establish [...] and taken up in other countries but Roebuck did not benefit as he had not taken out a patent. It continued to be used for two centuries. In 1759 Roebuck started an ironworks near Falkirk in Scotland that

leading millwright and one of the most prolific British engineers of docks and waterways in the Industrial Revolution. As either designer or consulting engineer he reported on over 200 projects. Rennie grew [...] and Lancaster canals in north-west England, the Aberdeen and Crinan canals in Scotland and the Royal Canal of Ireland. His maritime projects included commercial docks and harbours in London, Dublin, Liverpool [...] stone breakwater at Plymouth, which extended for 1.6-km in waters up to 20 m deep, and devised with Robert Stevenson the Bell Rock lighthouse on the east of Scotland, built in 1807-10. He pioneered steam-powered

to the intellectual background to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. He was born in Burslem, North Staffordshire, in a region where pottery manufacture was already well-established, although the units [...] models on which some of his designs were based. It was probably the largest and was certainly the most logically-designed pottery works of the period, in which workers undertook only limited tasks in the production [...] Joseph Wedgwood was, in his lifetime, the best-known pottery manufacturer in Europe. He made many notable contributions to the means of producing high-quality ceramic wares, and, in a broader sense, to

In 1784, Henry Cort invented one of the most important iron-making processes of the Industrial Revolution. This was a new method of transforming cast iron into the more versatile and valuable material [...] Portsmouth. Cort invested in the business and took over its management in 1776. He used a mill at the nearby village of Funtley to begin experiments with refining iron. His first patent, in 1783, was for a grooved [...] process, around 1786, was by Richard Crawshay at Cyfarthfa Ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, which became the largest ironworks in the world. Puddling and rolling became known as ‘the Welsh method’

starting point for a company involved in a wide range of industrial activities that is important in many countries. He was the son of a quarry master at Rebecq-Regnoz in Belgium. Ill-health prevented his [...] Cuillet near Charleroi in 1863, the same year in which he founded Solvay et Cie with his brother. In the 1870s the company became a global operation with the estalishment of plants in France at Dombasle near [...] university, instead of which he worked for an uncle at a gasworks where his interest in chemistry developed as he sought to find uses for the ammonia that was the by-product of gasmaking. In 1861 he developed

near Minden in 1803. In Brandenburg they worked with the Lauchhammer foundry. At Kołobrzeg (then in Prussia and now in Poland) they made two engines for the salt works on the Baltic sea in 1806. Williams [...] who moved in the 1780s to the southern German state of Saxony to build beam engines. The first ever beam engine was built in 1712 by the English ironmonger Thomas Newcomen. The value of engines in pumping [...] mines in the Mansfeld area and to power the salt works at Kötzschau, Schönebeck and Teuditz. Beyond Saxony, they provided engines in North-Rhine Westphalia for the salt works at Unna near Dortmund in 1799

leading British canal engineer in the early part of the Industrial Revolution. He was responsible for a network of waterways that became the arteries of Britain’s industrial regions and linked its principal [...] machinery and watercourses. In 1752, he created an ingenious solution to flooding problems at a coal mine in Lancashire, using a tunnel with an inverted syphon and a waterwheel pump. In 1759, he was appointed [...] arteries to transport the fuel, raw materials and products of industrial Britain. This was the 66-km Bridgewater Canal, completed in 1761, which carried coal to Manchester. He designed a stone aqueduct 180-m

his house in Redruth with gas in 1792 and in 1795 he demonstrated methods for producing and storing gas and gas lighting at Neath Abbey Ironworks in south Wales. In 1802 he installed lighting in the Boulton [...] key development of the Industrial Revolution - Murdoch devised the Sun and Planet Gear, patented in Watt’s name. In 1782 he invented an iron cement to seal steam engine components. In 1799 he patented the [...] the engine for Robert Fulton to use in the world’s first steamboat, at New York in 1807 and headed the production of marine engines for the company. While in Cornwall in the 1790s Murdoch experimented with

an entrepreneur and industrial spy who spread new cotton manufacturing technologies from England to Belgium and France at a key point in the early Industrial Revolution. He was born in Ghent, where his father [...] required the repayment of its loans and Bauwens was made bankrupt. He died in Paris in 1822. A statue of him was put up in Ghent in 1885 in the square named after him. [...] loans for his factories and set up more elsewhere in France and the Low Countries. He became mayor of Ghent in 1800. However, when Napoleon fell from power in 1814 at a time of difficult trading conditions

the two brothers became partners in the Bersham works in 1774, while William had a 1/8 share in John’s ironworks at Snedshill, Shropshire. William left Britain for France in 1777, following a visit to Bersham [...] out his brother’s share in Bersham, but William received ?8000 in compensation. William Wilkinson never became a commanding figure in the British iron industry, but his role in transmitting new technologies [...] William Wilkinson was the principal channel through which British innovations in ironmaking in the 18th century were transferred to continental Europe. He was the son of the pot founder Isaac Wilkinson