Established in 1871 on the outskirts of London, the Royal Indian Engineering College at Coopers Hill was arguably the first engineering school in Britain. For thirty-five years the college helped staff the government institutions of British India responsible for the railways, irrigation systems, telegraph network, and forests. Founded to meet the high demand for engineers in that country, it was closed thirty-five years later because its educational innovations had been surpassed by Britain's universities - on both occasions against the wishes of the Government of India. Imperial Engineers offers a complete history of the Royal Indian Engineering College. Drawing on the diaries of graduates working in India, the college magazine, student and alumni periodicals, and other archival documents, Richard Hornsey details why the college was established and how the students' education prepared them for their work. Illustrating the impact of the college and its graduates in India and beyond, Imperial Engineers illuminates the personal and professional experiences of British men in India as well as the transformation of engineering education at a time of social and technological change.

This book is the first complete biography of George Minchin Minchin (1845–1914), professor of applied mathematics at the Royal Indian Engineering College. Minchin’s extraordinary range of accomplishments offers a unique inside view of the major technological and educational developments of late nineteenth century Britain. The scientific community’s excitement during the early days of electromagnetic theory, wireless telegraphy, and x-rays are revealed by Minchin’s letters to eminent friends (notably the Maxwellians, Oliver Lodge and George Francis Fitzgerald). This book also traces Minchin’s little-known pioneering work on photoelectricity, which led to the first electrical measurements of starlight and laid the foundations for solar cells and television. Minchin’s mathematical textbooks were praised for their lucidity, and his advanced pedagogical thinking underpinned his lifelong work on reforming science education. He explained scientific concepts for a general audience using science fiction poetry and critiqued contemporary society in sharp and humorous satires. These works provide fresh perspectives on the place of science in Victorian society. This book is for anyone fascinated by the late nineteenth century revolution in electrical technologies.This is also a valuable read for historians of science, and for those interested in technical education, and science and society in Victorian Britain.

As London emerged from the devastation of the Second World War, planners and policymakers sought to rebuild the city in ways that would reshape the behavior of its citizens as much as it would its buildings and infrastructure-a program defined by a strong emphasis on civic order and conservative values of national community. One of the groups most significantly affected by this new, moralistic climate of reformation and renewal was queer men, whom the police, the media, and lawmakers targeted as an urgent urban problem by marking their lives and desires as criminal and deviant. In The Spiv and the Architect, Richard Hornsey examines how queer men legitimized, resisted, and reinvented this ambitious reconstruction program, which extended from the design of basic public spaces and municipal libraries to private living rooms and home decor. From their association with the urban stereotype of the spiv (slang for a young petty criminal who lived by his wits and shirked legitimate work) and vilification in the tabloids as perverts to the assimilated homosexuals within reformist psychology, Hornsey details how these efforts to transform London fundamentally restructured the experiences and identities of gay men in the city and throughout the country. Providing the first critical history of this cultural moment, In The Spiv and the Architect weaves together a vast archive of sources-canvases and photobooth self-portraits by the painter Francis Bacon, urban planning documents and drawings, popular fiction and films, autobiographical and psychological accounts of homosexuality, design exhibitions about the modern British home, and the library books defaced by the playwright Joe Orton-to present both a radically revised account of homosexuality in postwar London and an important new narrative about mid-twentieth-century British modernity.