The Darby dynasty were important figures in the British iron industry for nearly two centuries, and were responsible for innovations that profoundly changed the nature of ironmaking throughout the world [...] Belgium, Sweden and elsewhere. Abraham Darby IV was principally important for his role in the iron industry of South Wales rather than in Shropshire. He bought the furnaces at Ebbw Vale in 1844 and subsequently [...] furnaces and 237 puddling furnaces in 1872, and was comparable in size to the whole Shropshire iron industry. The Darby family maintained their connection with the Coalbrookdale Company in subsequent generations

18th century industrial operations. Jan Verbruggen played an important role in transmitting technology from the state-owned concerns of the ancien regime to the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution

cleaning products are some of the least romantic products of twentieth- and twenty-first-century industry, and their historical development is not widely understood. Friedrich Karl Henkel contributed s

Demidow dynasty of industrialists. From 1820 Yefim was chief mechanical engineer for the various industrial complexes in the area. Mirom, his son, was his apprentice and eventually his successor. In 1810

junior among others. In the 1970s, their many businesses employed more than a third of Sweden’s industrial workforce. André Oscar Wallenberg (1816-1886) was the son of the bishop of Linköping and served [...] Knut retired in 1911. Markus was involved with the development of important Swedish and Norwegian industries. In 1898 he bought the Swedish license for the Diesel engine and founded Diesels Motorer at Stockholm [...] engines. With the Norwegian Sam Eyde he founded Elkem (Det Norske Aktieselskap for Elektrokemisk Industri) and the Norsk hydroelectric company, which made Nitrogen fertiliser at Notodden. He also founded

Johanna von Schaffgotsch managed and expanded a vast industrial empire in Silesia and became one of the wealthiest women in Europe. Born Johanna Gryzik, she was the daughter of a miner who died when she [...] to the industrialist Karl Godulla at his mansion, Schomberg Palace. Godulla owned the largest industrial empire in the German states during the early nineteenth century. He developed a special relationship [...] more. At the same time she sold the zinc mines and smelters that Godulla had developed, as the zinc industry was now unprofitable. In 1905 she created a joint stock company, Gräflich Schaffgotsch’sche Werke

Tomás de Zubiría e Ybarra (later Count Zubiría) was one of the leading industrial entrepreneurs in Spain in the early twentieth century and president of the country’s largest company, the steel conglomerate [...] other steel companies, La Vizcaya and La Iberia. Together, they occupied a huge proportion of the industrial land along the estuary of Bilbao and employed around 6,000 people. Zubiría remained president of

Gutiérrez de Cabiedes was one of the business people responsible for the growth of the iron and steel industries in the Basque Country. He had diverse commercial interests in banking, mining and railways but

Ybarra Gutiérrez de Cabiedes was one of the people responsible for the growth of the iron and steel industries in the Basque Country. He had diverse commercial interests in banking, mining and railways but [...] near Bilbao - a site well-placed for exporting products and importing coal. It became the largest industrial plant in the Biscay region. They installed ovens for direct reduction of iron ore to make malleable

ruthless promoter of the iron and steel industry in Bohemia (then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Czechia). He was born at Gohlis, a rapidly expanding industrial suburb of the city of Leipzig. His father [...] to Vienna he studied engineering at the technical university but dropped out after a year. His industrial career began when took a job as a technical draughtsman at the iron and steel rolling mills at [...] the St Egydi iron and steel company in Lower Austria. He then brought together the scythe-making industry of Upper Styria as the Vereinigte Sensenwerke (United Scythe Factories). In 1889 he founded a private

ter’ and moderniser who managed enterprises in all sectors of Spanish industry. As president of the national institute of industry in the 1970s he led more than 200,000 employees. His family ran a hardware [...] store in Barcelona. After graduating from the school of industrial engineers in the city in 1946 his first job was as an engineer in the textile industry at Tarrasa in Catalunya. He then moved to the Spanish [...] a state-owned financing company established by the Franco regime in 1941 to reconstruct Spanish industry after the Civil War and increase economic self-sufficiency. He restructured the organisation and

company built stations on other rivers across Spain with the aim of providing electricity for key industrial regions without the need for a national grid. They supplied Madrid from a station in the river [...] en España' (1917). He was vice-president of other leading companies, Babcock and Wilcox and the Industrial Credit Society, and a director of the Madrid tram and gas companies. He advised on the creation

Nicolás María de Urgoiti y Achúcarro was a leader of the Spanish paper manufacturing industry who became an important figure in publishing. After beginning as an engineer he merged several paper mills [...] and coal, had good supplies of water and could draw capital from the steelmaking and shipbuilding industries. However, Urgoiti’s factory was among those struggling to adapt and he toured Europe examining [...] examining new practices. In 1901 he designed a merger to reduce competition and strengthen the industry. Eleven factories united in a new company, La Papelera Española, which produced 68% of Spanish paper. Urgoiti

The ability to bleach products was increasingly important during the Industrial Revolution as industries such as cotton manufacturing and papermaking grew rapidly. In traditional bleaching, materials were [...] Charles Tennant, made it far easier to transport and use. It became a pillar of the new chemical industries. Charles Tennant was born into a farming family in Ayrshire, south-west Scotland. As a boy he was

In eighteenth-century Portugal, Guilherme (originally William) Stephens developed the glass industry and gained a national monopoly, with his brother João Diogo (originally John James, 1747–1826). Stephens [...] leading centre for glassmaking in Portugal. The mansion Palácio Stephens is a museum of the glass industry.

at the village of Barreiro, across the Tagus estuary from Lisbon, which would become the largest industrial complex in Portugal. Da Silva built the facilities to create a town and developed social provision [...] families - a school, medical assistance and a social security system. In 1911 he entered the shipping industry, buying eight ships to transport his goods. He founded the cigarette manufacturer Tabaqueira in

patented lithographic printing, which became the dominant method for reproducing images in the printing industry from the early nineteenth century. It was the first radical development in printing since the invention

Johann Heinrich Schüle was a pioneer in the industrial-scale production of printed cotton fabric in eighteenth-century Bavaria. He broke through traditional restrictions at the city of Augsburg to establish [...] building. The emblem from its gates and other material about calico printing are displayed in the industrial museum.

Sir Richard Arkwright transformed the cotton industry throughout Europe. He was born at Preston, and after being apprenticed as a barber, moved to work for a peruke maker at to Bolton-le-Moors, where textile [...] linked Cromford to the inland waterways network, and was well-acquainted with intellectuals of the Industrial Revolution period, including Erasmus Darwin, James Watt and Samuel More. Part of the situation

British Industrial Revolution, particularly in the manufacture of sulphuric acid, iron production and the invention of the steam engine. He helped to establish central Scotland as a heavy industrial region [...] confidently applied new methods on a large scale. It was fuelled by coal when almost all of the iron industry still relied on charcoal and it was unique in being built with multiple blast furnaces from the [...] works at Kinneil, about 10 km east of Carron, though he could raise enough capital to develop the industries as intended. At the same time, he went into partnership with the young inventor James Watt and