Heroes of invention

Page 184

Exercise 1

DISCUSS. How are great inventors generally celebrated in your country?

• Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, was first represented on the 100 liras coin and then on the 2,000 Italian lire bill. There is a museum in Ancona about him and his inventions and among the schools that take his name, there is also the Italian School in Manhattan.

• After Alessandro Volta's death, the inventor of the battery, the capacitor and the electrophorus, the honors soon began to be built. For example In Como there is a statue of Volta wearing a toga, built by Francesco Durelli. In San Maurizio Brunate it was erected the Volta Lighthouse.

• Leonardo da Vinci, a well-known italian painter and inventor of the Renaissance period, has given shape to different monuments erected in his honor during the centuries that followed his death. In Piazzale degli Uffizi in Florence there is a statue of him such as there is also one in Piazza della Scala in Milan, right in front of the theater. Then there is the Library of Leonardo in his hometown.

Exercise 2

AS YOU READ the text, underline the places mentioned and locate them on the map.

1. Samuel Crompton → Spinning mule in 1779 → There is a bronze statue in Bolton;

2. Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch → They built an engine which could drive many different machines → There is a statue in Birmingham;

3. Abraham Darby → He invented the smelting if iron with coked coal and founded a major iron-making dinasty → The world's first iron bridge in Coalbrookdale;

4. James Watt → he was the improver of the engine that Newcomen designed first to pump water out of mines → There are three statues in Glasgow.

The first half of Queen Victoria's reign

Pages 284-285

Exercise 4

MATCH the words in column A with those in column B to form key terms about the firs half of Victoria's reign.

1. Imperial expansion

2. Political reforms

3. Constitutional monarchy

4. Party politics

5. Working-class movement

6. Technological development

The building of the railways

Pages 286-287

Exercise 1

DISCUSS what fears the Victorians might have had about the first trains and how the advent of the railways might have changed their lives.

At first, there was fears that the passengers' eyes would be damaged by having to adjust to the motion.

The railways were originally conceived to reduce the cost and time of transporting goods but then the line proved equally popular with travellers and it became primarily a passenger service and the first to rely completely on steam locomotion. Fares gradually came down thanks to competition and excursion trains grew.

Exercise 3

ANSWER the questions about the development of the railways.

1. What made the development of the railways possible?

   The development of railways became possible thanks to the invention of an engine driven by steam but it was already developing when Watt produced the steam-powered loom. But it was Richard Trevithick who, in 1804, opened the possibility of making a steam engine move itself.

2. What was the “railway mania”?

   Entrepreneurs began to plan all sorts of schemes of railways to Parliament and from here started the "railway mania" that is a race to the construction of thousands of railways, the number of which reached 4.600 miles.

3. What encouraged the use of railways for the transport of passengers?

   William Gladstone’s 1844 Railway Act obligated every company to supply at least one train daily at the cost of no more than one penny a mile and then the growth of excursion trains and the Great Exhibition of 1851 stimolated the use of a lots of railways to transport passengers.