Samuel Smiles published Lives of the Engineers in 1862. The noted biographer presented his engineers as heroic progress makers who conquered nature and overcame impossible obstacles to drive the Industrial Revolution forward, but included twisted and often fabricated accounts in his work.

In Ten Engineers Who Made Britain Great, Anthony Burton seeks to correct this narrative by offering nuanced portraits of some of the best-known engineers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Burton investigates the common themes that run between the stories of John Metcalf, James Brindley, John Smeaton, William Jessop, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Richard Trevithick, George and Robert Stephenson, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and also explores how each of these men learned from one another.