I’ve read a couple of brilliant Brum-related books recently, and I thought I’d suggest that you should enjoy them too… The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson is a great book about Joseph Priestley — inventor of carbonated water (and hence fizzy pop), discoverer of oxygen and the first man in Birmingham to have what I fancy as a job (local luminaries paid him to muck about — erm, experiment — in return for hearing the results). His time in Birmingham — yes another Lunar Society member — was quite short, and ended in his house being burnt to the ground by religious zealots, but it was a time that epitomised the open collaboration between peers and the ground-breaking ideas that he had been striving for where ever he lived. The book is to a certain extent focused on his influence on the American founding fathers, Franklin and Adams, but it’s a read that doesn’t shy away from making parallels with the modern day — would that our scientists and engineers were equally at home talking politics and religion. If it whets an appetite for lunaticks try Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future by Jenny Uglow which while...
