1 Introduction : inventors and other heroes

The inventor was an improbable hero. Neither his conceptual pedigree nor his personal attributes marked him out as a transparently heroic figure. Long distrusted as a monopolist and ‘projector’, he toiled in an anonymous workshop, far from the glorious field of battle, or the terrors of the ice floes, the desert, or the jungle. Yet, in a century remarkable for its celebration of heroes, the inventor too had his pedestal and his laurel wreath. Notoriously, in the essays of Samuel Smiles, he took centre stage, the epitome of ‘self help’, but this was only one facet of a cult whose origins preceded Smiles’ worthy gospel by several decades and whose significance ran much deeper. The intrusion of inventors amidst the warriors, monarchs and statesmen who dominated the pantheon of early nineteenth-century Britain represented a challenge to aristocratic society. As astute observers recognized, the ‘colossal’ statue of James Watt, installed in Westminster Abbey in 1834, was the harbinger of a new age; it was the cultural counterpart of the Reform Act of 1832.