The time: The early 1700s
The place: England, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
In this book, Jenny Uglow details the lives of the group of men – industrialists, scientists, doctors, and others – who made up the “Lunar Society of Birmingham“.
Some of them you've may have heard of – James Watt, Joseph Priestly, Erasmus Darwin. For others, such as Josiah Wedgewood, you may know the name from something else .
And other you've probably never heard of.
This is a pretty good book. It's interesting, for example, to find out about the amount of chemistry that is required in pottery making to get the right result.
It would be a better book, however, if it were around 300 pages rather than 500 page in length. There's a lot of detail there, and while I appreciate a desire for historical accuracy, after 400 pages I lost interest and moved on. [Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium]