“Blake and Coleridge and Wilberforce were… contemporaries of Arkwright and James Watt. Against this, those who hold the illusion that pre-industrial England was more sensitive and cultured, point to the misery of the manufacturing age. …[T]errible evils …are …far older than 1800 and the machines. But in the factory these evils became naked and public; and the driving force for reform came from the men of the mill, from Robert Owen and the elder Peel.”

— Jacob Bronowski

The Common Sense of Science (1951)

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Jacob Bronowski 79

Polish-born British mathematician 1908–1974

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