“I had an immense advantage over many others,” wrote the Victorian inventor and steelmaker Henry Bessemer in his autobiography, “inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.” Thousands of the British tinkerers, hobbyists, designers and amateur engineers who arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century could have made similar claims, but while Bessemer’s famous converter revolutionised the production of steel across the world, fortifying the military might of Empire and building the American railroads, other inventors and speculators watched sadly as their cherished gadgets and ‘apparatuses’ struggled for a footnote in history. A list of transformative Victorian inventions would cover everything from telephones, flush lavatories, photographs and the cinema to bicycles, cars, tarmac and reinforced concrete; but who now, alas, has heard of the Volunteer Reversible Trowser, the Epanalepsian Advertizing Vehicle or the “New and Useful Design for an Instrument to be attached to Lawn Tennis Rackets for picking up balls from the ground”?