The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the greatest engineering feat of its age. George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket was to become the most famous locomotive in history. William Huskisson was one of the greatest statesmen of his generation, and certainly the most accident-prone. On 15 September 1830, the three met for the first time.
Simon Garfield was born in 1960. He is the author of Expensive Habits: The Dark Side of the Industry (1986), The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS (1994), which was awardedthe Somerset Maugham Prize, The Wrestling (1996), The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1(1998), the best-selling Mauve (2000), described by the Daily Telegraph as 'aremarkable book about science which also happens to be a miniature work of art', and the acclaimed The Last Journey of William Huskisson