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Shelley’s Steam Ship
Monday September 11, 2023
£3.00 – £5.00Taking place at 7.30 pm at The Pye Building, Cambridge Museum of Technology
Duration: 50 minutes plus question time
Tickets: on the door for £5 a head, £3 for students. Members and Volunteers of Cambridge Museum of Technology can attend for free
Cambridge Industrial Archaeology Group’s Autumn / Winter programme opens with a talk by Dr John Gardner of Anglia Ruskin University which highlights a little-known but intriguing link between literature and technology.
The talk is about the poet Percy Shelley’s attempt to build a steam ship to trade between Livorno and Marseilles in 1820. This was new technology as the first successful passenger steamship had sailed only a decade earlier. It seems odd to think of a poet engaging in a cutting-edge engineering project as the whole notion of Romanticism seems to be against it. However, this was a period when there were fewer distinctions between the arts of Engineering and the Humanities. In this talk, Dr Gardner will discuss these interactions at a time when amateur engineers, such as Shelley, felt that they could engage in the development of new technology.
For further info e-mail mrs.pamela.a.halls@gmail.com
What’s Ons are broadcast across the day at 7.50, 10.30, 1.30 and 4.30, and at weekends.
To get your event included email: Karen Stringer