The Life, Times, and Scientific Labours of the Second Marquis of Worcester: To Which Is Added a Reprint of His Century of Inventions, 1663, with a Commentary Thereon.

The second Marquis of Worcester stands as one of the most remarkable figures in the history of technology: an English nobleman who, amid civil war and royal collapse, invented the steam engine. This Victorian biography by Henry Dircks recovers the extraordinary story of Edward Somerset (1601-1667), whose "fire engine" for raising water predated Thomas Newcomen's famous atmospheric engine by seven decades. Born into privilege but undone by his loyalty to the Crown, Somerset spent his final years imprisoned for debt and obscurity, yet his "Century of Inventions" (1663) became a foundational text in the history of engineering. Dircks weaves biography, political history, and technical analysis into a portrait of a man ahead of his time, dismissed by his contemporaries, and finally vindicated by history. The book is for anyone curious about where the industrial revolution truly began, and who remembers that the first steam engine was not the work of a factory engineer but of a desperate, indebted marquis who bet everything on the King's cause and lost.