7 Books Like Wedgwood

What really attracted to me about this book was Jenny Uglow’s ability to bring the eighteenth century alive in her biographies of five men – Josiah Wedgwood, Mathew Boulton, James Watt, Eramus Darwin, and Joseph Priestley – who met every month near Birmingham when the moon was full (so that they could see their way home).

These men genuinely transformed the world with their discoveries that created and powered the first factories and revolutionized our understanding of the natural and chemical worlds. For some reason I always remember Uglow’s description of Wedgwood, who invented the process for mass producing china, being so scientifically curious that he insisted on sitting up to watch his own leg being amputated.

This book is a wonderful, personal introduction to the English Enlightenment.

Men of Iron examines the Crowley Iron Works, one of the eighteenth century’s foremost industrial enterprises.

Sir Ambrose Crowley founded it and used his understanding of the period’s logistics to undercut competitors by setting up a nailery in Sunderland, moving to Winlaton in 1691. There he could import bar iron from Sweden and ship products by sea to a London warehouse complex, avoiding the era’s slow and muddy roads.

With the good fortune of two lengthy wars, he built a major military supply business, with 1,500 employees, becoming a City of London Alderman and a Tory MP. At Winlaton, he established the “Law Book of the Crowley Iron Works” which instituted enlightened personnel policies and an old-age pension scheme.

Crowley’s life shows that the Industrial Revolution, which included new techniques of HR and logistics management as much as steam engines, was already stirring before 1700.

James Brindley built the core elements of Britain’s canal system, which halved the coal price in several industrial cities.

He began as the son of an impoverished rural farmer, then apprenticed to a millwright, before setting up as a craftsman-engineer. Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Gower hired him to survey a potential Trent and Mersey Canal, before introducing him to his brother-in-law Samuel Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater who wanted to connect his Worsley coal mines to Manchester.

Corble’s book centres on the Bridgewater Canal, which Brindley surveyed, developing new “puddling” techniques to seal the bottom. Brindley then used the Bridgewater Canal as a demonstration project for his much larger “Grand Cross” canal system, connecting the Severn, Trent, Mersey, and Thames rivers.

With Gower’s help, Brindley got Parliamentary authorization, raising capital from local landowners and country banks. Brindley’s Grand Cross became a gigantic infrastructure leap forward, kick-starting the Industrial Revolution. 

The Industrial Revolution required machine tools, and machining tolerances far tighter than those prevailing in 1700.

That revolution was chiefly the result of Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay. Bramah designed an improved water closet and invented the hydraulic press.

He discovered the need for replaceable parts and tight tolerances after building a complex Challenge Lock, which became commercially viable after Maudslay enabled him to manufacture it in quantity – the Bramah Locks business still exists today.

Maudslay left Bramah in 1797, becoming the pioneer of the machine tool industry, inventing the screw-cutting lathe, the bench micrometer, and the table-top steam engine, as well as the steam dredger.

He was also responsible for the Portsmouth Dockyard Block Mills, a Royal Navy facility that used a production line, two steam engines, and 45 specially designed machines to make 130,000 pulley blocks in 1808 – the world’s first true mass production. 

The Pot Thief Who Studied the Woman at Otowi Crossing (A Pot Thief Murder Mystery) is a fun, quick read. Our pot dealer (not the kind you smoke) owns a shop in Albuquerque's Old Town. "Hubie" as he is called, digs for pottery on public lands to sell in his shop. I enjoyed his university meetings and the hierarchy at the University of New Mexico. When things got heated among the profs, he dove into a book until the collegiate clashing was over. Fond of margaritas, and who isn't, I got a kick out of how much mystery solving he could do at this favorite bar. My characters share that trait by stopping by The Shed in Santa Fe with regularity.

This is a poetic masterwork with the potter’s wheel as a metaphor for creating our lives as “an ongoing process” in which every act integrates all of life. In our current era there is a tendency to cry cultural appropriation when we look beyond our immediate context and study art healing principles within the whole human community and find ourselves in others. Mary Caroline Richards offers good art medicine for this myopia in demonstrating how ideas are not the property of persons “but live in the world” as people and all of nature do. “The deeper we go” in the contemplative process of centering, the more separations “dissolve.”

When it comes to monster romances off the beaten path, Magen Cubed is not afraid to play with more macabre themes. I enjoy all of their shorts, but The Ecstasy of Cornelia Day really sold me. When Cordelia moves into a new house, she realizes there are still spirits within its walls, and she starts to feel more than fear for the specters that haunt her. If you’re a fan of the pottery scene in Ghost and aren’t afraid to get a spooky and ethereal…try this. You’ll thank me.