“Mr. Smiles has hit upon a rich vein of ore, and works it with great success. He has the art of biography, which is by no means so easy of attainment as, judging from the number of persons who attempt this species of composition, one would imagine it to be. Memoirs are countless, but the number of biographies that can be accepted as successful works of art are very few indeed. Mr. Smiles is not only a skillful workman; he has chosen a new field of work. Hitherto the great biographies have been written of soldiers, and sailors, and statesmen, poets and artists, and philosophers. It would seem as if these only were the great men of the world, as if these only were the benefactors of mankind, whose deeds are worthy of memory. The suspicion has arisen that, after all, there may be other heroes than those of the pen, the sceptre, and the sword. There are, indeed, men in various walks of life whose footsteps are worthy of being traced; but, surely, considering what England is, and to what we owe most of our material greatness, the lives of our Engineers are peculiarly worthy of being written. ‘The true Epic of our time,’ says Mr. Carlyle, ‘is not Arms and the man, but Tools and the man — an infinitely wider kind of Epic.’ Our machinery has been the making of us; our iron-works have, in spite of the progress of other nations, still kept the balance in our hands. Smith-work, in all its branches of engine-making, machine-making, tool-making, cutlery, iron shipbuilding, and iron-working generally, is our chief glory. England is the mistress of manufactures, and so the queen of the world, because it is the land of Smith; and Mr. Smiles’s biographies are a history of the great family of Smith. Many of the facts which he places before us are wholly new, and are derived from the most likely sources. Thus, Maudslay’s partner, Mr. Joshua Field, and his pupil, Mr. Nasmyth, supplied the materials for his biography. Mr. John Penn supplied the chief material for the memoir of Clement. And so of the other memoirs; though they necessarily go over much well-trodden ground, they contain also much original information, expressed with great clearness, and with a practiced skill which renders the readers secure of entertainment in every page.” — The Times .

“This is not a very large book, but it is astonishing how much individual, conscientious, and thoroughly original search has been required for its composition, and how much interesting matter it contains which we possess in no other form. Mr. Smiles rescues no name, but many histories, from oblivion. His heroes are known and gratefully remembered for the benefits they have conferred on mankind; but our knowledge of our benefactors has hitherto been mostly confined to our knowledge of the benefit. It was reserved for Mr. Smiles to discover in the workshop, heroes as true as ever hurled their battalions across a battle-field, and to present us with much-enduring, much-endeavoring, and brave men, where hitherto we had been content with disembodied, almost meaningless names. The present work is further distinguished, not indeed from its predecessors, but from much of the current literature, by the exquisitely pellucid English, the vigorous but unobtrusive style, in which the narratives are conveyed. The value of the work before us is doubled, and the time required for perusing, and especially for consulting it, halved, by the full and minute index in which its contents are tabulated.” — Edinburgh Daily Review .