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How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the 19th-Century Innovators Who Forged Our Future
The rich and fascinating history of the scientific revolution of the Victorian Era, leading to transformative advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.
With their expert culture of accuracy and precision, they created telegraphs and telephones, electric trams and railways, built machines that could think, and devised engines that could reach for the skies. When Cyrus Field’s audacious plan to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic finally succeeded in 1866, it showed how science, properly disciplined, could make new worlds. As crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the exhibitions its success inaugurated, they came to see the future made fact—to see the future being built before their eyes.
In this rich and absorbing book, a distinguished historian of science tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage’s dream of mechanizing mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s tunnel beneath the Thames to George’s Cayley’s fantasies of powered flight and Nikola Tesla’s visions of an electrical world, it is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures—a rich tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took mankind to the Moon.
The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.
With their expert culture of accuracy and precision, they created telegraphs and telephones, electric trams and railways, built machines that could think, and devised engines that could reach for the skies. When Cyrus Field’s audacious plan to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic finally succeeded in 1866, it showed how science, properly disciplined, could make new worlds. As crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the exhibitions its success inaugurated, they came to see the future made fact—to see the future being built before their eyes.
In this rich and absorbing book, a distinguished historian of science tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage’s dream of mechanizing mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s tunnel beneath the Thames to George’s Cayley’s fantasies of powered flight and Nikola Tesla’s visions of an electrical world, it is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures—a rich tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took mankind to the Moon.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published December 6, 2022
17 people are currently reading
253 people want to read
About the author
Iwan Rhys Morus
20 books4 followersIwan Rhys Morus is professor of history and Welsh history at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University. He graduated in Natural Science from Cambridge University in 1985 before completing his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science there also.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 9, 2022
Despite beginning and ending his book with a tale of a Victorian moonshot, Iwan Rhys Morus is not writing steam punk fiction here, but rather exploring the nature of the Victorian scientific and engineering mentality, particularly in the UK, and how that made a huge transformation possible and has continued to influence the way we do some things, up to and including the Apollo programme.
Rhys Morus goes on give us stories of the development of everything from steam railways to the telegraph, from the transformation of electricity into the power source of the world to powered flight. Many of the characters we meet will be familiar - names such as Brunel, Stephenson, Faraday (anything but typical in personality of the kind of inventor Rhys Morus is focussing on), Babbage, Edison (less than I'd perhaps expect), the Wright brothers and many more. But there are also the less familiar, for example those involved in developing and laying the transatlantic cable, an epic boys-own story of failure transformed into eventual success.
We also get a useful contrast between the often wealthy inventors and the working people who made their inventions come to life. Stories of hardship and skill in, for example, digging Victorian tunnels have often been heard before, but we also see, for example, a dispute between Babbage and the craftsman who built the constructed part of the Difference Engine, who claimed ownership of the specialist tools he developed, where Babbage believed, as it was his idea, they should be his. And another very strong thread is the connection between Victorian invention and technology and empire. Rhys Morus makes it clear that he does not approve the imperial links - though it would have been interesting to explore whether we would have the science and technology we enjoy today without this being the case.
Sometimes, Rhys Morus does suffer from the enthusiast's habit of giving too much detail about things that don't really carry the story forward - naming too many bit part players, for example - while the underlying theme of these being practical men (almost all men), with focus and discipline is perhaps repeated a bit too often. We also see too much attention given to Nikola Tesla (who Rhys Morus has written a biography of): Tesla was arguably not a typical Victorian inventor in the sense we see here, being far too flamboyant and given to fantasies. As a result, for example, Rhys Morus claims that Tesla's dream of wireless power 'came to nothing, in part at least, because Tesla refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention - that invention could never be a one-man show.' In reality those dreams came to nothing because Telsa was an excellent electrical engineer but had very little understanding of physics and his scheme could never have worked.
However, the span of the exploration of Victorian achievements (always with that underlying doubt about the tie-in to empire) is excellently handled and this was an interesting book to read.
Rhys Morus goes on give us stories of the development of everything from steam railways to the telegraph, from the transformation of electricity into the power source of the world to powered flight. Many of the characters we meet will be familiar - names such as Brunel, Stephenson, Faraday (anything but typical in personality of the kind of inventor Rhys Morus is focussing on), Babbage, Edison (less than I'd perhaps expect), the Wright brothers and many more. But there are also the less familiar, for example those involved in developing and laying the transatlantic cable, an epic boys-own story of failure transformed into eventual success.
We also get a useful contrast between the often wealthy inventors and the working people who made their inventions come to life. Stories of hardship and skill in, for example, digging Victorian tunnels have often been heard before, but we also see, for example, a dispute between Babbage and the craftsman who built the constructed part of the Difference Engine, who claimed ownership of the specialist tools he developed, where Babbage believed, as it was his idea, they should be his. And another very strong thread is the connection between Victorian invention and technology and empire. Rhys Morus makes it clear that he does not approve the imperial links - though it would have been interesting to explore whether we would have the science and technology we enjoy today without this being the case.
Sometimes, Rhys Morus does suffer from the enthusiast's habit of giving too much detail about things that don't really carry the story forward - naming too many bit part players, for example - while the underlying theme of these being practical men (almost all men), with focus and discipline is perhaps repeated a bit too often. We also see too much attention given to Nikola Tesla (who Rhys Morus has written a biography of): Tesla was arguably not a typical Victorian inventor in the sense we see here, being far too flamboyant and given to fantasies. As a result, for example, Rhys Morus claims that Tesla's dream of wireless power 'came to nothing, in part at least, because Tesla refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention - that invention could never be a one-man show.' In reality those dreams came to nothing because Telsa was an excellent electrical engineer but had very little understanding of physics and his scheme could never have worked.
However, the span of the exploration of Victorian achievements (always with that underlying doubt about the tie-in to empire) is excellently handled and this was an interesting book to read.
March 31, 2025
Let's call this a strong 3.5 stars -- it reads like a non-fiction short story collection, crossing various industrial and scientific topics through the Victorian age, some more interesting to me than others. It certainly has its moments, and it is extremely useful as a general research tool.
December 11, 2022
In How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon, Iwan Rhys Morus makes the illuminating point that one of the most important things that happened in Victorian times was a change in thinking. “Just fifty years earlier, most people assumed that the future would simply be an extension of the past.” This realisation that men could shape the future by imagining how it could be different and then inventing stuff to make that future happen.
A cornerstone of the scientific establishment during the early 1800s was the Royal Society. Sir Joseph Banks was president for more than forty years and he had used his position and the power it gave him to ensure that only people like him were acknowledged as scientists and only their inventions had merit. This really constrained progress: Charles Babbage, for example, designed the first computer in the 1840s. If a more enthusiastic Royal Society had championed his cause and ensured he had the funding to build his ‘Analytical Engine’, the world might have seen the benefits of computers seventy years earlier.
A significant part of the book covers the politics of the Victorian scientific world: the jockeying for positions of power within the Royal Society; the formation of various other societies; the rivalry between inventors working in the same field. I’m afraid that this part is not terribly exciting and my attention did wander. Whether any or all of the Geological Society, the Astronomical Society and the Society for Animal Chemistry succeeded or failed is not information that I retained beyond reading Chapter One – sorry!
However, the book is good in many other respects, especially at showing us how scientists needed to be commercial and to have practical skills. Henry Wilde improved magneto-electric machines in the 1860s – yawn. Henry Wilde showed how his improved machine could melt an iron bar – wow! Another great scientist, Nikola Tesla, didn’t fulfil his full promise because he “refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention – that invention could never be a one-man show.” I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to study science beyond GCSE-level, as it emphasises the need to keep one foot in the real world and to think about what that science means to the layperson and how to explain it to them.
#HowtheVictoriansTookUstotheMoon #NetGalley
A cornerstone of the scientific establishment during the early 1800s was the Royal Society. Sir Joseph Banks was president for more than forty years and he had used his position and the power it gave him to ensure that only people like him were acknowledged as scientists and only their inventions had merit. This really constrained progress: Charles Babbage, for example, designed the first computer in the 1840s. If a more enthusiastic Royal Society had championed his cause and ensured he had the funding to build his ‘Analytical Engine’, the world might have seen the benefits of computers seventy years earlier.
A significant part of the book covers the politics of the Victorian scientific world: the jockeying for positions of power within the Royal Society; the formation of various other societies; the rivalry between inventors working in the same field. I’m afraid that this part is not terribly exciting and my attention did wander. Whether any or all of the Geological Society, the Astronomical Society and the Society for Animal Chemistry succeeded or failed is not information that I retained beyond reading Chapter One – sorry!
However, the book is good in many other respects, especially at showing us how scientists needed to be commercial and to have practical skills. Henry Wilde improved magneto-electric machines in the 1860s – yawn. Henry Wilde showed how his improved machine could melt an iron bar – wow! Another great scientist, Nikola Tesla, didn’t fulfil his full promise because he “refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention – that invention could never be a one-man show.” I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to study science beyond GCSE-level, as it emphasises the need to keep one foot in the real world and to think about what that science means to the layperson and how to explain it to them.
#HowtheVictoriansTookUstotheMoon #NetGalley
May 5, 2023
"The Victorians may not have made it to the Moon, but they had the Moon in their sights and they were confident that they would get there".
An incredible amount changed technologically during the Victorian period (1837-1901). Electricity, vehicles, planes, wireless telegraph, etc. It was the first time that a generation didn't just think going into space would be interesting (because that thought had been around for much longer) but that their technology would help get us there one day. And only 68 years after the era ended, we would, indeed make it to the moon.
I rated this mid-line. It was interesting and well researched. But something made it difficult for me to get into. Was it the writing style, all the names (a true downfall with my dyslexia), or my need to read late into the night until exhaustion takes over, thus making it hard for me to concentrate or comprehend. As someone who reads a lot of history, especially in the Victorian era, there just wasn't much in here that was new to me. But, with that being said, I believe if you are just setting out on your history journey, then 'How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon' would be a great one to jump into!
An incredible amount changed technologically during the Victorian period (1837-1901). Electricity, vehicles, planes, wireless telegraph, etc. It was the first time that a generation didn't just think going into space would be interesting (because that thought had been around for much longer) but that their technology would help get us there one day. And only 68 years after the era ended, we would, indeed make it to the moon.
I rated this mid-line. It was interesting and well researched. But something made it difficult for me to get into. Was it the writing style, all the names (a true downfall with my dyslexia), or my need to read late into the night until exhaustion takes over, thus making it hard for me to concentrate or comprehend. As someone who reads a lot of history, especially in the Victorian era, there just wasn't much in here that was new to me. But, with that being said, I believe if you are just setting out on your history journey, then 'How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon' would be a great one to jump into!
October 30, 2022
In How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon, Iwan Rhys Morus makes the illuminating point that one of the most important things that happened in Victorian times was a change in thinking. “Just fifty years earlier, most people assumed that the future would simply be an extension of the past.” This realisation that men could shape the future by imagining how it could be different and then inventing stuff to make that future happen.
A cornerstone of the scientific establishment during the early 1800s was the Royal Society. Sir Joseph Banks was president for more than forty years and he had used his position and the power it gave him to ensure that only people like him were acknowledged as scientists and only their inventions had merit. This really constrained progress: Charles Babbage, for example, designed the first computer in the 1840s. If a more enthusiastic Royal Society had championed his cause and ensured he had the funding to build his ‘Analytical Engine’, the world might have seen the benefits of computers seventy years earlier.
A significant part of the book covers the politics of the Victorian scientific world: the jockeying for positions of power within the Royal Society; the formation of various other societies; the rivalry between inventors working in the same field. I’m afraid that this part is not terribly exciting and my attention did wander. Whether any or all of the Geological Society, the Astronomical Society and the Society for Animal Chemistry succeeded or failed is not information that I retained beyond reading Chapter One – sorry!
However, the book is good in many other respects, especially at showing us how scientists needed to be commercial and to have practical skills. Henry Wilde improved magneto-electric machines in the 1860s – yawn. Henry Wilde showed how his improved machine could melt an iron bar – wow! Another great scientist, Nikola Tesla, didn’t fulfil his full promise because he “refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention – that invention could never be a one-man show.” I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to study science beyond GCSE-level, as it emphasises the need to keep one foot in the real world and to think about what that science means to the layperson and how to explain it to them.
#HowtheVictoriansTookUstotheMoon #NetGalley
A cornerstone of the scientific establishment during the early 1800s was the Royal Society. Sir Joseph Banks was president for more than forty years and he had used his position and the power it gave him to ensure that only people like him were acknowledged as scientists and only their inventions had merit. This really constrained progress: Charles Babbage, for example, designed the first computer in the 1840s. If a more enthusiastic Royal Society had championed his cause and ensured he had the funding to build his ‘Analytical Engine’, the world might have seen the benefits of computers seventy years earlier.
A significant part of the book covers the politics of the Victorian scientific world: the jockeying for positions of power within the Royal Society; the formation of various other societies; the rivalry between inventors working in the same field. I’m afraid that this part is not terribly exciting and my attention did wander. Whether any or all of the Geological Society, the Astronomical Society and the Society for Animal Chemistry succeeded or failed is not information that I retained beyond reading Chapter One – sorry!
However, the book is good in many other respects, especially at showing us how scientists needed to be commercial and to have practical skills. Henry Wilde improved magneto-electric machines in the 1860s – yawn. Henry Wilde showed how his improved machine could melt an iron bar – wow! Another great scientist, Nikola Tesla, didn’t fulfil his full promise because he “refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention – that invention could never be a one-man show.” I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to study science beyond GCSE-level, as it emphasises the need to keep one foot in the real world and to think about what that science means to the layperson and how to explain it to them.
#HowtheVictoriansTookUstotheMoon #NetGalley
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February 16, 2024This is an exploration of how Victorian innovations, development and men (I use the term intentionally) laid the foundation for ongoing science and technology.
I admit I found the first half slow going. The events and personalities came across as facts and lists rather than the (I would imagine) exciting, maybe even scandalous, clashes that would have played out at the time. No doubt The Royal Society played a hugely important role in fostering and challenging ideas, but its internal politics make dry reading from this vantage point. I found myself dipping in and out rather than reading from start to finish. This was easy enough to do with each chapter’s focus being on a different technology.
I enjoyed the later chapters more, especially about telegraphy and attempts to fly.
Each chapter ends with a list of cited references, which will be a useful resource for further perusal.
I admit I found the first half slow going. The events and personalities came across as facts and lists rather than the (I would imagine) exciting, maybe even scandalous, clashes that would have played out at the time. No doubt The Royal Society played a hugely important role in fostering and challenging ideas, but its internal politics make dry reading from this vantage point. I found myself dipping in and out rather than reading from start to finish. This was easy enough to do with each chapter’s focus being on a different technology.
I enjoyed the later chapters more, especially about telegraphy and attempts to fly.
Each chapter ends with a list of cited references, which will be a useful resource for further perusal.
July 10, 2023
This book is really just an excuse to tell a lot of great stories about triumphs of Victorian science and engineering. The silly title refers to the extraordinary ambition of the Victorians and how they might (italics) have made it to the moon.....the author shoe horns a lot of statements about the fact that the incredible blossoming of Victorian knowledge and building were a reflection of their "imperial world view as white men" .....or something....this seems a bit tacked-on and a sop to fashionable concerns rather than a genuinely held belief of the author in my view.
April 3, 2025
Great book with so many facts and stories about innovation and just to total bonkers confidence that the victoeian age seemed to embody. Was a bit annoyed at the lack of women included, there are a couple of mentions and obviously it was very much a male dominated societal period, but there were women thinking and doing and I think the the book didn't cover this very well,which along with quotes from the time such as ' the task becomes so easy it can be given to a girl!' Or something similar gave a bit of a bitter tone that I didn't like.
July 22, 2023
3.5 but dropped to 3. Somewhat interesting, though I found the title to be a bit misleading and the connection a bit tenuous. Be ready for a cavalcade of names, some known, some less so. An interesting perspective on how Victorian science influences modern scientific approaches, though it's not made explicit enough.
November 1, 2022
The XIX century is an age of discoveries and this is an informative, well researched, and entertaining book about the people and the organisations.
Well told and interesting.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine
Well told and interesting.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine
April 13, 2025
Everyone is talking about how quickly the world is changing, but those of us living now are not as surprised as those living during the Victorian era. Just think the first telegraph cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean in 1866. The changes of the Victorian era were many and truly mind blowing.
April 27, 2024
Full of information.
August 10, 2024
Informative, but could had used a chapter on Victorian chemical science and the submarine, stuff that could had worked towards space flight….
June 23, 2025
It’s best chapter is on the exhibitions of the 19th century, and it references Tesla throughout. I wanted more from it.
August 2, 2025
Interesting to a point. It's not a dip in/out book but a solid set of chapters. I had to 'gear up' to read it rather than be excited to pick it up during some down time.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews