Isaac Newton investigating light

Science and technology

Cover of the Voyages Extraordinaires series by the French science fiction writer Jules Verne.

The phantom menace: 10 milestones in science fiction.

BBC History Magazine

Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis

BBC History Magazine

Time's Anvil: England, Archaeology and the Imagination

Vintage Astro lava lamp from the 1960s

50 years of the lava lamp

John Linnell's 1816 portrait of Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick. His high-pressure steam engine "was the invention that unleashed power on this planet," says Michael Mosley. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

My history hero: Richard Trevithick (1771-1833).

Richard Buckminster standing next to his draft of a house of the 21st century. (Ullstein picture via Getty Images)

My History Hero: Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983).

BBC History Magazine

Circulation: William Harvey’s Revolutionary Idea

A monument to Nicolaus Copernicus in Poland.

Q&AWas Copernicus the first to demonstrate that the earth goes around the sun?.

Two women from South America. Six centuries ago South American civilisations matched the west in some respects. (Getty Images)

The wonder of the west

A historical image from the iron and steel industry in Teeside

Industrial revolution

175 years of iron and steel

BBC History Magazine

Boffinology: The Real Stories Behind Our Greatest Scientific Discoveries

BBC History Magazine

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science

BBC History Magazine

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City

BBC History Magazine

Race for the South Pole: the Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen

BBC History Magazine

Galileo

BBC History Magazine

Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox

BBC History Magazine

God’s Philosophers

An illustration of the compound microscope used by British inventor and microbiologist Robert Hooke

An experimental society.

Historical objects - toilets and medicines.

BBC History Magazine

Boyle: Between God and Science

Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming (later head of the British Secret Service), Professor Redwood and Bernard Redwood at the Motor Yacht Club Reliability Trials on Southampton Water, 1907. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

First World War spooks.

Transport minister Ernest Marples on a road bridge near the London end of the newly opened M1 motorway, 2 November 1959. (Photo by George W. Hales/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

The first day on the M1.

Attenborough on Darwin.

An engraving showing chimneys emitting smoke during the Industrial Revolution

Can history help halt the runaway train?.

The members of Captain Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. (Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images)

Scott of the Antarctic: a true British hero?.