'Rich and sparkling, this is a wonderful book.' Claire Tomalin, Guardian, Books of the Year Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers ISBN: 9780007149537 Number of pages: 380 Weight: 440 g Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 37 mm MEDIA REVIEWS In this breathtaking group biography, Richard Holmes tells the stories of the period's celebrated innovators and their great scientific discoveries: from telescopic sight to the miner's lamp, and from the first balloon flight to African exploration. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of artistic and scientific discovery - astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical - that together made up the 'age of wonder'. The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook's first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science-an era whose consequences are with us still.īONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes's Falling Upwards.Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes's dazzling portrait of the age of great scientific discovery is a groundbreaking achievement. Other voyages of discovery-astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical-swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution.

Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes