This book deals with the period when iron became the dominant ’high-technology’ material, increasingly taking over from timber and masonry. It was necessary for the engines and machines of the new industries, but equally vital for the vast civil engineering works which supported this industrialisation. It was these works - mills, warehouses, dockyards, and above all bridges - which so impressed the public in the early 19th century. The papers selected here trace the evolving structural uses of cast and wrought iron in frames and roofs for buildings, and look in particular at the development of bridge design and construction, in America, France, and Russia, as well as in Britain. They cover the processes of design and testing, and at the same time throw much light on the attitudes and careers of the engineers themselves.

'[Sutherland’s]...pedigree as editor of such a volume is therefore beyond dispute...he brings magisterial authority to the volume’s Introduction....this volume [is]...to be very much welcomed by industrial archaeologists for focusing attention on the wealth of published material on subjects crucial to our understanding of the engineering infrastructure of modern society and for making the material so easily accessible....' Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1 'The aim of Ashgate's twelve volume series is to bring together collections of important papers on particular topics from scholarly journals, conference proceedings and other hard-to-access sources. This is a wholly laudable objective. Some of the papers in the volume under review [The Civil Engineering of Canals and Railways before 1850] cannot be found even in abundantly-resourced academic libraries. The series opens up, directly or indirectly, debates over the nature of historical evidence which arise from the profoundly different approaches to the past of historians of technology, whose works are principally represented in these volumes, industrial archaeologists and social and economic historians.' Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1

R.J.M. Sutherland, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Past President of the Newcomen Society S.B. Hamilton, A. W. Skempton, H.R. Johnson, R.S. Fitzgerald, R.J.M. Sutherland, E.J. Diestelkamp, S.J Fedorov, E.L. Kemp, T. Day, A. Picon, B. Trinder, D.A. Gasparini, C. Provost, D. Smith, J.G. James.