Industrial

Sewing machine

Clothing was stitched by hand in the early 1800s and tailors' businesses were booming, continuing a tradition over 20,000 years old. When the first sewing machine was invented by French tailor Barthelemy Thimonnier in 1830, a riot broke out and a group of his fellow tailors set fire to his factory, fearing unemployment. This machine never came into general use and almost a decade later American machinist Elias Howe would improve on the design by creating a lockstitch that linked together two threads and wouldn't come undone. His machine was faster than anything that came before it at a rate of 250 stitches a minute, yet Howe struggled to persuade clothing manufacturers to pay for his pricey invention. In 1846 he left America for London where corset-maker William Frederick Thomas would invest to protect the Howe machine from being copied. Howe's invention wound up making Thomas a very wealthy man and Howe was left with nothing.

Y, ELIAS HOWE

Suspension bridge

The famous inventor, designer and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a huge part of Britain's Industrial Revolution, building bridges, tunnels, railways, docks and ships. He changed the way people could travel and many of his designs still stand today, such as London's Paddington Station (1854) and the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.

The latter was a wrought-iron marvel, linking Clifton in Bristol to Leigh Woods

In North Somerset, England. It also marked Brunel's first commission. It was the earliest of its kind, high enough so that tall ships could sail beneath it and sturdy enough to provide safe ' passage for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. Unfortunately due to the Bristol riots, the bridge wasn't built until after his death but this distinctive landmark served as a fitting memorial to the great man.

The London Underground is the world's oldest subway system

London Underground

Trains were a popular way to travel in the Victorian era, undercutting the cost of a horse-drawn carriage and beating it to the finish line, too. But the rise in Greater London's population meant the city was beginning to buckle under the strain of too many commuters and not enough transport links to get them where they needed to be. Then Charles Pearson proposed a plan to move everything underground, the so-called 'train in a drain', in 1845. It took some persuading but the House of Commons approved a bill in 1853 to build a subterranean railway from Paddington to Farringdon. It was over 150 years ago that the world's first underground train made its debut journey, with passengers anxious to experience it.

The Metropolitan was a huge success and 26,000 people hopped aboard each day in the first six months. However, it wasn't just the gap they had to mind, as commuters were enveloped in clouds of smoke from the steam trains and other passengers (smoking wasn't banned until after the King's Cross fire in 1987). The Underground continued to grow, reaching out to the then sleepy villages of Hammersmith and Morden and the transport links caused their modest populations to boom. Charles Pearson never lived to see his vision completed, having died a year before the Underground opened, but his legacy is everlasting.