HENRIETTA HEALD, Author
William Armstrong, Magician of the North: the man who laid the foundations for Newcastle University
Date/Time: 25th November 2010, 17:30 - 18:30
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William, Baron Armstrong of Cragside (1810–1900) is Britain’s forgotten hero. Inventor, scientist, engineer and industrialist, he was born in Newcastle 200 years ago and did more than any other to secure the city’s pre-eminence at the heart of empire.
Armstrong has a claim on the title ‘inventor of modern living’. Made a Fellow of the Royal Society at 35, he was a visionary scientist, engineer and businessman who bestrode the 19th-century world like a colossus, bringing global renown to his great Elswick works on the Tyne – and becoming both a national icon and a figure of fierce controversy. In its heyday, Elswick employed 25,000 people in the manufacture of hydraulic machinery, ships and armaments. Armstrong built Newcastle’s Swing Bridge and the hydraulic mechanism that operates London’s Tower Bridge. He created Cragside in Northumberland, the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity, planting in its grounds more than seven million trees. And he made a vital contribution to the development of education in Britain, setting up a mechanics’ institute and founding the College of Science, later Newcastle University.Henrietta Heald is the author of William Armstrong: Magician of the North, the first full-scale biography of this remarkable man. She sets out to explain how the boy whose love affair with water and passion for invention led to the development of a worldwide commercial network that became a cornerstone of the British Empire. Henrietta is a writer and editor with a particular interest in British heritage, politics and the countryside. A graduate of Durham University, she had a long and successful career in book publishing, before taking up the pen herself. She was chief editor of the bestselling Chronicle of Britain and Ireland.
