It's an amazing design and construction with kind of dovetail joints. The last time I was there a number of American engineers had come to see it. People in the modern age wondered just how it was built, how they got those large and very heavy struts into place but some years ago somebody came by a painting that had been done of it in mid construction, which showed the wooden cranes they built.

2 January 1892 - Sir George Airy died.

Mathematician and astronomer, Astronomer Royal 1835-81. Noted for his work on planetary orbits and for calculating the density of the Earth. He also responsible for establishing the prime meridian running through Greenwich which in 1884 was adopted as the international Prime Meridian dividing the globe into east and west and establishing a standard measurement of time - GMT as the standard with the globe plus or minus x number of hours ahead or behind GMT. 

With a smartphone you ought to be able to do this anywhere along the Meridian as it bisects eastern England. It runs through the centre of Louth, Lincolnshire for instance.   

3 January 1795 - Josiah Wedgwood died.

The greatest of the Staffordshire potters in the centre of the UK pottery industry.

The son of a pottery manufacturer Josiah set up his own business in Burslem in 1759. Such was his success that he built a new factory and community he named Etruria creating ceramics sold the world over. He was a consummate man of business being one of the founders of the Trent and Mersey Canal and founding schools and chapels. 

He died at Etruria Hall, still standing today as a hotel, a few miles from where I live.

The current Wedgwood factory paused production for several months last year due to rising costs and lack of demand. The Wedgwood Museum is a fascinating place.

4 January 1809 - Louis Braille born.

Blinded in one eye in an accident aged three, an infection deprived him of sight in the other eye by the age of five. Nevertheless he gained a good education at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. There he developed a system of tactile code to allow the blind to read improving a system invented by a fellow Frenchman. He published his findings in 1824 when he was just 15, but it was not universally accepted until after his death aged 43 in the 1850s.

All devised by a 15 year old. He was never in robust health and died aged just 43.  

5 January 1855 - King Camp Gillette born.

American businessman and inventor of the safety razor.

Whilst working for a company in Baltimore Gillette came up with the idea of a safe disposable razor as opposed to the existing razors which required sharpening every day. Once his design had been perfected and manufactured he founded the American Safety Razor Co. in 1901 and by the end of the decade he had opened plants in Canada and Europe. 

6 January 1706 - Benjamin Franklin born.

American inventor and politician, one of the greatest intellectuals of the age.

It was Thomas Newcomen who invented and built the world's first commercially successful steam engine in 1712. It was a beam engine which used the power of atmospheric pressure to drive it. The atmosphere is putting 14lbs per square inch on everything, including you. The steam produced drove the piston up the cylinder, driving the beam the beam and when it reached the top the steam was condensed with a shot of water and atmospheric pressure then pushed it back.There is still a replica Newcomen engine at work in Cornwall. These first engines were used to pump water out of the tin and coal mines, some stretching a considerable way out under the sea. James Watt had there bright idea of adding a separate condenser to the engine in 1776, thus making it far more efficient. There was no way to calculate the power of these engines and so they equated it to the most common form of power in the country, the horse, and horsepower was invented. Also, the Newcomen engine was a vertical engine whereas Watt produced rotary power. The term watt, to measure electricity is named after him.

7 January 1785 - The First Flight Across the English Channel.

Little more than three years after the Montgolfier brothers made the first untethered balloon flight over Paris a Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and an American John Jeffries took off in a hydrogen balloon from Dover Castle and flew across the Channel in 2½ hours landing at Guines in northern France. 

The puffing devil

The Stevenson family, father and son, were genius engineers. The great leap forward in steam engines, which Stevenson invented was the multi tubular boiler, which allowed water to be heated over a much greater area. It just about became the standard for every steam train that was ever made after that. He gets the title father of the Railways because he produced the first viable steam engine to carry passengers and built the world’s first railway line which travelled between Stockton and Darlington followed by Manchester to Liverpool. It’s still there and passes close to where I live. His passenger station in Manchester still exists and was the first railway passenger station in the world. My grandfather was the Ostler at this station in 1908 until 1914 before he left for the first world war. His line runs across what is called the moss, it’s peat land, soft and boggy. Stevenson had possibly thousands of bales of hay thrown onto this land before he ran his line over it. When a train goes along it the line actually moves slightly from side to side. As an aside the moss land was the largest vegetable growing area in Europe at one time, it doesn’t grow a single lettuce now.