author
Marquis of Edward Somerset Worcester
1601–1667
A royalist nobleman, diplomat, and restless mechanical thinker, he is best remembered for the curious inventions collected in A Century of the Names and Scantlings of Inventions. His life moved between court politics, civil war, and early experiments that later generations linked with steam power.
1 Audiobook
The Century of Inventions of the Marquis of Worcester from the Original MS., with Historical and Explanatory Notes and a Biographical Memoir
by Marquis of Edward Somerset Worcester
About the author
Born in the early 1600s into the Somerset family, he became the 2nd Marquess of Worcester and was a prominent supporter of the royalist cause during the English Civil Wars. Reliable reference works describe him as both a Catholic nobleman deeply involved in politics and an inventor, a combination that gives his career an unusual energy.
He is often associated with diplomacy as well as engineering curiosity. In later life, his reputation came to rest largely on A Century of the Names and Scantlings of Inventions, a short but famous book listing devices and ideas he claimed to have devised. Because many of the entries are brief and sometimes cryptic, readers have long debated how far they describe practical machines and how far they point toward ideas ahead of their time.
That mix of public action and private ingenuity is what keeps him interesting. He stands at a crossroads of aristocratic power, civil-war upheaval, and the early history of technology, remembered less for a single finished invention than for the imaginative reach of his projects.