One of the most popular Victorian writers, Samuel Smiles (1812 1904) made his name in 1859 with the original self-improvement manual Self-Help. His highly successful multi-volume Lives of the Engineers (also reissued in this series) contained biographies of men who had, like him, achieved greatness not through privilege but through hard work. Left incomplete at his death, edited by the social theorist Thomas Mackay (1849 1912) and first published in 1905, his autobiography opens with a vivid description of the Scottish garrison town of his birth during the Napoleonic wars. In his later years...

Civilisation began with tools; and every step in advance has been accomplished through their improvement. James Nasmyth's goal had always been to optimise those tools by applying common sense to the use of materials, which became the core principle of his very own definition of engineering. Reprint of the autobiography originally published in 1885.

This biography of the civil engineer Thomas Telford (1757 1834) was published in 1867 by Samuel Smiles (1812 1904), the author of Self-Help and of other biographies of engineers and innovators. Smiles had already written about Telford's life and achievements in Volume 2 of his Lives of the Engineers (which is also reissued in this series), but in returning to the topic he adds to this new edition an introductory section (taken from Volume 1 of Lives of the Engineers) on the history of roads in Britain, from prehistoric trackways, via the Romans, to the modern road-building system pioneered by...