Anywhere: David Edgerton (Keywords)

It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say, or the Sovie...

Whereas standard histories of technology give tired old accounts of the usual inventions - planes, bombs - this book is based on a different idea. Its thrust is that for the full picture of the history of technology we need to know not about what a few people invented, but about what everyday peo...

It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say, or the Sovie...

The history of England and the aeroplane is one tangled with myths - of 'the Few' and the Blitz, of boffins, flying machines, amateur inventors and muddling through. In 'England and the Aeroplane' David Edgerton reverses received wisdom, showing that the aeroplane is a central and revealing a...

Drawing on a wealth of statistical data, David Edgerton argues that British innovation and technical training were much stronger than is generally believed, and that from 1870 to 1970 Britain's innovative record was comparable to that of Germany.