Dr Anton Howes, Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @antonhowes

Dr Anton Howes

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Fantastic blogpost by @jasoncrawford on why the bicycle wasn’t invented earlier. We can ask similar questions of many other technologies. My favourite is the flying shuttle on looms. Another is

Have I told you about the time @theRSAorg purchased pretty much the entire village of West Wycombe?One of the Society's many random projects in its role as the country's semi-official

Incredible that it's only within past few years that UK archives were allowed to make copies of material in their own collections just to preserve them. Think of all the

Today I've fallen down the Venetian 15thC patents rabbit hole. One of my hunches proving correct: that what we would now call copyright was indistinguishable at the time from a

You see blue plaques dotted all over Britain, commemorating such-and-such a famous person who lived in a building. They seem, at first glance, just a nice reminder of history. But

Gaining a new insight, perhaps, from Celia Fiennes's 1690s travel accounts into the economics of the Cornish tin and copper mines in the years just before Newcomen invented his engine.

When you think of environmentalist royals, you probably think of Prince Charles.But he really gets it all from his father, Prince Philip, who was at the forefront of the very

When you think of the Industrial Revolution, you might think of soot-belching factories and squalid cities.But just as some inventors pioneered the use of factories, other inventors sought solutions to

You've probably heard of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World's Fair, held in the remarkable Crystal Palace. It had 6 million visitors, and took place in the largest

When it comes to attracting the top scientists, engineers and inventors, the UK takes the approach of build-it-and-they-will-come. It lowers barriers to entry or makes the country more attractive to

In the mid-18thC, one of the major worrying diseases was typhus. Nowadays, we know it's spread by lice or fleas. But at the time, like so many other diseases, it

What's the one organisation that has had Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, *and* Karl Marx, all as members?Well, let me tell you about the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures