Biography
Both Eugenius and his brother were born in Gloucester Terrace, Shoreditch, to grain dealer John and wife Susanne. Fascinated by engineering from a young age, while still a boy he submitted a design for a passenger carriage to the London and Greenwich Railway company. Innovatively, he had against the then convention placed the wheels beneath the carriage as opposed to the side, freeing more room for the passengers.
Read more about this topic: Eugenius Birch
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)