Knight's Cyclopaedia of the Indistry of all Nations - HARDCOVER

About The Book : The great Industrial Exhibition of 1851 — great in every sense of the word, if worthily carried out, — will be a kind of summing up of the labours of half a century. It will be a practical test, whereby we may know how much, and of what kind, the first half of the nineteenth century has been able to achieve in the application of skilled labour. Before the present century, efforts were too scattered to be susceptible of easy comparison ; and the great moving forces of industry, (so to speak) were yet in their infancy. In applying this designation to the steam engine and the fectroy system^ we do that for which there is much warranty : each of these is a mighty agent both for combination and for subdivision; for applying to all work to be done, just so much force as will meet the requirements of the case ; for economising space and time, capital and labour, materials and tools ; for rendering invention and supervision doubly effective ; and for developing an amount of precision and accuracy which never before marked industrial processes. About The Author : Charles Knight (1791 –1873) was an English publisher, editor and author. He published and contributed to works such as The Penny Magazine, The Penny Cyclopaedia, and The English Cyclopaedia, and established the Local Government Chronicle. In addition to being the editor and author of Penny Magazine and Penny Cyclopedia, and other popular works, Knight wrote The Results of Machinery (1831) and Knowledge is Power, which was published in 1855. A Popular History of England over eight volumes appeared in 1856. In 1864 he withdrew from the business of publishing, but he continued to write nearly to the close of his long life, authoring The Shadows of the Old Booksellers (1865), an autobiography under the title Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century (2 vols., 1864–1865), and an historical novel, Begg'd at Court (1867).