The Radical Victorians

History is one of those subjects that gets no respect. Most of the time it is taught as a string of loosely connected stories that are short on truth and are all forced into supporting a national or ideological story line. I hate to use words like myth or fairy tale because myths and fairy tales usually have far more integrity.

Life is messy and though technology and financing changes our physical world, human nature remains the same. As the comedian Lenny Bruce would say -we're all the same smucks.  

I don't want to run off on a tangent. It's easy to see how technology effects our world but rarely do people give financing a second thought. Maybe it has to do with the stereotype of  accountants being boring but I don't think it's a stretch to say the five pound banknote  did as much to change the world as the steam engine.  Without the banknote and the steam engine the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian Era  would not have happened.

The Victorian Era was one of the most radical periods of human history. That's not the popular image.  It's easier to cling on to caricatures from "Scrooge, The Musical" or 30 years of Masterpiece Theater.  

Say "Victorian" and the first thing that comes to mind is sexual restraint and repression, which is only partly true. Here's a whole other tangent that want to save for later. 

Say "Victorian" and the first thing that comes to mind is sexual restraint and repression, which is only [partly true. Here's a whole other tangent that want to save for later. Throughout the ages there has always been erotic art but in the 1800's there's photography and inexpensive ways of producing and distributing it. In public the Victorians acted like prudes but it was a different story in private. All you have to do is look at some the pictures they left behind and see what we would think of as hard core porn was available then. Today it might not seem very shocking only because all the same stuff is only couple of mouse clicks away.

One stock story in history is that the Wright Brothers were the first to fly in a heavier than air power controlled aircraft.  It's hardly ever mentioned that Aberto Santos-Dumont almost beat the Wright Brothers in the race to be first. Even more obscure is that sixty years before the Wright Brothers , two British inventors were on the path to becoming the first to build an airplane.  

In 1848 John Stringfellow and William Samuel Henson built and successfully flew a steam powered airplane. The craft was only a test model with a 10 foot wingspan but it did fly under its own power.  The event is remembered in Chard, a town in Somerset England, but forgotten by the rest of the world.

Pictures from the museum in Chard. 

 Stringfellow and Henson were a lot like the Wright Brothers, all four men were products of the growing middle class. Even the idea of a middle class didn't really exist before the Industrial Revolution. Before the rise of industry a tiny aristocracy owned the vast majority of wealth and property.  Up to, and even in some cases in excess of, ninety percent of the people were slaves, serfs or peasants; with a few merchants and skilled laborers mixed in. The United States was an exception to European society because there was a continent of land that could be taken from the Native Americans, that allow even the poorest farmer the opportunity to own property.

For the first time in history there was a viable option to being very poor or lucky enough to be born into a noble family. The ambitions of the middle class became the real economic engine of the century as well as the source of the most important inventions, art and literature of that time. There was more progress in the 1800's that the twenty preceding centuries before it.

As Stringfellow and Henson worked on enlarging their aircraft, they already had plans to start the world's first airline, The Arial Transit Company. With copies of their plans they showed their future aeroplane traveling to exotic locations like Egypt and China.

The Wright Brothers had succeed in flight because of the internal combustion engine. Pound for pound the gasoline powered engine supplied more horse power than any steam engine could. That's not to say the steam engine Stringfellow and Henson developed wasn't a marvel of engineering. Though it could never power a large craft, perhaps -just maybe it could have taken one person aloft half a century before the famous flight at Kitty Hawk and a decade before the American Civil War.

History is filled with similar twists. Thomas Edison discovered the basic principal of the semi-conductor but it took the world another 30 years to realize how to use it. Alexander Graham Bell did far more than invent the telephone and also pioneered in aviation and the development of the hydrofoil.

Jules Verne published one last book in 1904, Master Of The World. In some ways it like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea except the world is terrorized by a giant airship instead of a submarine. Jules Verne had no prior knowledge of the Wright Brothers but it's an amazing coincidence that his story starts in North Carolina