Post by @fasnix
"In the nineteenth century, engineering was beginning to work its magic. Invented as a concept in France, where bright men with huge foreheads sat around talking about the possibilities, it was taken up by the British, who actually dug the coal, made the iron and got the machines to work.
If anyone had come to Britain in, say, 1840, they simply wouldn't have beleved their eyes. Elsewhere in the world it was sail and oxen, but here there were factories and steam engines and trains. It would have been like visiting a country today where they have interstellar travel and dogs in spacesuits. We were light years ahead."
from: "Jeremy Clarkson - I Know You Got Soul"
