exciting museum. Here visitors can find out more about the past history of the local textile industry at first hand. In the offices they can eavesdrop on the clerks. Later they can travel alongside the bales

were some of the first products to be made here. The citizens of Altena had been working in the iron trade since the Middle Ages and it was no accident that one of them was the first to draw wire around [...] turnover. Altena and the neighbouring town of Iserlohn have remained important centres of the wire industry to the present day. The German Wire Museum exists since 1965. It was originally housed in a part

guests reverently climb the wonderfully carved wooden staircase sweeping upwards in a curve to the first floor of the house. In doing so they gaze on a picture of cloth production as it generally occurred [...] firms experienced in expanding their businesses in the narrow Rur valley resulted in the cloth industry gradually moving away from the area. Now the Red House, more than anything else, stands as a reminded

backdrop of a 19th century group of buildings: Ludwik Geyer's "White Factory", one of the first textile industry hubs in Poland, along with the Łódź City Culture Park, an open air museum setting with a

importance. Founded in 1784 by a young textile merchant Samuel Greg, Quarry Bank Mill was one of the first generation of waterpowered cotton spinning mills. Styal was chosen for a number of reasons, not least [...] machines working and meet skilled Millworkers with years of experience of working in the cotton industry. 4. The Great Iron Waterwheel and two Steam Engines Quarry Bank Mill and Styal Estate now offers

John Marshall (1765-1845) was the pioneer of the flax industry in the Industrial Revolution period, and Temple Mill in Leeds is his most impressive memorial. After entering his father’s modest linen business [...] entrepreneurship, developing flax spinning technology patented by John Kendrew and Thomas Porthouse, at first at a small mill at Adel, north of Leeds, and then at a new mill south of the city centre that was

and then served primarily as a supplier of raw materials and a sales market for the first plants of Russian industry. more LUXEMBOURG Who would have thought that this small country in the heart of Europe [...] farming ... more ESTONIA After the Russian Czars assimilated Estonia into their empire in 1710, the first manufactories gradually emerged, such as the saw mill in Räpina, glass works at Põltsama ... more [...] mentioning are limestone and gypsum, which can be used for the production of ... more MONACO No industry of note developed in Europe's second smallest state, but the 1860s saw a pioneering economic revival

"Société Générale", the first joint-stock bank, was founded and soon afterwards the Banque de Belgique. Both provided targeted investment capital for the development of industry: Belgium was also a pioneer [...] Brussels to Mechelen - the first section of the long-distance line from Antwerp via the burgeoning industrial cities of Liège and Verviers to Cologne, which was opened in 1843 as the first international railway [...] and efficient agriculture provided the large landowners with investment capital. Belgium was the first place on the continent where one of the revolutionary British steam-powered machines was installed:

Marché"opened in Paris the first of its chain of world-famous department stores. The brothers Émile and Isaac Pereire, bitter rivals of the Rothschild bankers, founded the first investment bank, "Crédit [...] railway network was delayed by strong resistance and the notorious shortage of capital. In 1827, the first train carried coal from the mining area around St. Etienne to the Loire for shipment, and in 1832 [...] "Crédit Mobilier". At the end of the century, another push followed. Heavy industry in Lorraine profited when a new smelting process was used to eliminate the troublesome phosphorus from the "Minette" ores found

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 [...] mechanical innovations remains a subject for debate, but there is no doubt that it was he who for the first time organised the production of cotton yarn on a factory basis, using a succession of carding and

Ernest Solvay’s innovations transformed the chemical industry throughout Europe, and were the starting point for a company involved in a wide range of industrial activities that is important in many countries [...] chloride. The sodium bicarbonate is precipitated, and heated to produce soda ash. Solvay set up his first commercial plant at Cuillet near Charleroi in 1863, the same year in which he founded Solvay et Cie

Nobel studied and gained experience of industry in France, Italy, Germany and the United States. He began to develop nitroglycerine in 1859-60, after it had first been prepared by Ascanio Sobrero (1812-88) [...] purified glycerine with a mixture of concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids. Nobel took out his first patent in 1863, but nitroglycerine proved unstable until in 1866 he combined it with kieselguhr to

prototype of all modern petrol engines in 1885, creating the first carburettor in the same year. Daimler attached an engine to a bicycle, producing the first motorcycle, in 1885, and the following year attached [...] Gottlieb Daimler was one of the outstanding pioneers of the motor industry. Born at Schorndorf, Wurtemburg, he studied at the Polytechnic in Stuttgart, before travelling to enlarge his understanding of [...] (1832-91). In this and other ventures he worked closely with Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929), whom he first met when he was working in a charitable home, the Bruderhaus in Reutlingen, where Maybach was an inmate

Coalbrookdale, the ironmaster who, in the 1750s, established a pattern of management in the iron industry that was followed in other parts of Britain and in other European countries. Her diaries provide [...] was born Abiah Maude, daughter of a wealthy family of Quakers at Bishopswearmouth, Sunderland. Her first marriage, to John Sinclair, ended with the death of her husband in 1737. She met Abraham Darby in [...] remainder of her life to journeys as a Quaker minister. At Coalbrookdale she and her husband lived first at Dale House, which is now conserved, and from 1750 at a new, larger house in a park, called Sunniside

patronage of Queen Charlotte, and exported to America and the Caribbean. In 1770 he fulfilled the first of many orders for the Empress Catherine of Europe, and in 1771-2 sent a succession of parcels of [...] production, and his flair for marketing were his contributions to the development of the ceramics industry. He was active in the promotion of turnpike roads, and of canals, particularly prominent of the

cannon. De Wendel was responsible for the construction of the Fonderie Royale at Le Creusot, the first stage of which included four blast furnaces, and 24 km of iron railway. The last stages of the journey [...] received ?8000 in compensation. William Wilkinson never became a commanding figure in the British iron industry, but his role in transmitting new technologies to France was of great importance.

whose writings about his early career are a valuable source of evidence on the state of British industry in the 1830s. He was born in Edinburgh, the son of Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840), an artist, designer [...] of the ironworks at Coalbrookdale. In 1834 he set up a machine tool workshop in Manchester on the first floor of a tenemented former textile mill, where the beam of a steam engine that was being machined [...] . The steam hammer was patented in 1842, and a double-acting version was introduced in 1843. The first working steam hammer was made in Le Creusot by Frenchmen who had seen Nasmyth’s drawings while visiting

Ruskin Hall (now Ruskin College), Oxford, in 1900. While on military service in India during the First World War he learned Sanskrit. He was employed at the railway works, principally as a hammerman, between [...] between 1892 and 1914, when ill-health caused him to seek outdoor employment as a market gardener. His first significant publication, Songs of Wiltshire, appeared in 1902, and A Wiltshire Village, ten years [...] district in which I find myself’, but, unusually, he was also interested in describing large-scale industry. His Life in Railway Factory, published in 1915, provides a vivid record of a management regime

collecting and conserving films. In 1937, with Henri Langlois, he founded Cinematheque Francaise, the first dedicated film archive, where he worked until 1949, and in 1938 was amongst the founders of the Federation [...] the Saar. It was intended as a celebration of Guy Monnet’s plan for the modernisation of French industry as part of the European Coal and Steel Community, but Franju showed the steelworks as an ugly intrusion [...] made Hotel des Invalides, an ironic critique of France’s principal military museum. He directed his first feature, La Tete contre les Murs (The Keepers) in 1958, followed by the horror film Les Yeux sans

Carl Zeiss, by origin a maker of lenses, was one of the leaders of the photographic industry in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century the successors to the company he founded [...] Weimar, studied at the university of Jena, and in 1846 let up a workshop where he made lenses, at first for microscopes and then for cameras. He won a prize at the Thuringia Industrial Exhibition in 1861