The enthralling biography of the shepherd boy who changed the world with his revolutionary engineering & whose genius we still benefit from today Thomas Telford`s name is familiar; his story less so. Born in 1757 in the Scottish Borders, his father died in his infancy, plunging the family into poverty. Telford`s life soared to span almost eight decades of gloriously obsessive, prodigiously productive energy. Few people have done more to shape our nation. Thomas Telford invented the modern road. A stonemason turned architect turned engineer, he built churches, harbours, canals, docks & the famously vertiginous Pontcysyllte aqueduct in Wales. He created the backbone of our national road network. His bridges are some of the most dramatic & beautiful ever built, most of all the Menai Bridge, a wonder then & now, which spans the dangerous channel between the mainland & Anglesey. His constructions were the most stupendous in Europe for a thousand years, &
- astonishingly
- almost everything he ever built remains in use today. Telford was a complex man: a shepherd`s boy who loved the countryside but helped industrialise it; an ambitious man who cared little for accolades; highly sociable & charming, but peculiarly private about his personal life; & an engineer who was also a poet. He cherished a vision of a country connected to transform mobility & commerce: his radical politics lay not in ideas but the creation of useful, solid things. In an age in which economics, engineering & national identity came together, Thomas Telford`s life was a model of what can be achieved by persistence, skill & ambition. Drawing on contemporary accounts, this, the first full modern biography of Telford, at once intimate & expansive, is an utterly original portrait. It is a book of roads & landscapes, waterways & bridges, but above all, of how one man transformed himself into the greatest engineer Britain has ever produced.