Children Of Light. How Electricity Changed Britain Forever

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: Fine
Publisher: Atlantic
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2011
Edition: First Edition

Description: 304 pages. Ex-Library. (only one small stamp on inside page). Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: In the early 1870s a nighttime view over Britain would have revealed towns lit by the warm glow of gas and oil lamps and a much darker countryside, the only light emanating from the fiery sparks of late running steam trains. However, by the end of this same decade,Victorian Britons would experience a new brilliance in their streets, town halls, and other public places. Electricity had come to town. In Children of Light, Gavin Weightman brings to life not just the most celebrated electrical pioneers, such as Thomas Edison, but also the men such as Rookes Crompton who lit Henley Regatta in 1879; Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, a direct descendant of one of the Venetian Doges, who built Britain’s first major power station on the Thames at Deptford; and AngloIrish aristocrat, Charles Parsons inventor of the steam turbine, which revolutionized the generating of electricity. Children of Light takes in the electrification of the tramways and the London Underground, the transformation of the home with labor saving devices, the vital modernizing of industry during two world wars, and the battles between environmentalists and the promoters of electric power, which began in earnest when the first pylons went up. As Children of Light shows, the electric revolution has brought us luxury that would have astonished the Victorians, but at a price we are still having to pay.

ISBN: 9781848871175