The most powerful idea in the world

About this book

"In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it?the steam engine. In the process he tackles the question that has obsessed historians ever since: What made eighteenth-century Britain such fertile soil for inventors? Rosen?s answer focuses on a simple notion that had become enshrined in British law the century before: that people had the right to own and profit from their ideas" --Cover, p. 2.