Made in Manchester ...why the original industrial city never stopped innovating

The story of England's pioneering northern powerhouse doesn't begin and end with factories, football and music. A definitive new book reveals its key role in everything from nuclear fusion and computing to radical politics and women’s suffrage

- Brian Groom

WHAT comes to mind when you think of Manchester? Coronation Street perhaps, or the football stars of Manchester City and United. Maybe musicians like Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis or comedians such as Victoria Wood, Les Dawson, Caroline Aherne and Peter Kay.

Manchester certainly knows how to have a good time "a city that thinks a table is for dancing on", goes the saying.

Yet there is far more to its story than popular entertainment. Manchester and its region were pioneers of the Industrial Revolution and its scientists and industrialists have played a massive part in fashioning the world we know today. Researchers at Manchester University, for example, produced a computer called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, nicknamed Baby, in 1948- the first time a program had been stored in a computer's memory.

It heralded the arrival of modern computing. New Zealander Ernest Rutherford achieved the first ever artificially induced nuclear reaction while at the University of Manchester from 1907-19, ushering in the nuclear age.

A century before that, John Dalton, a weaver's son from Cumberland who led a frugal bachelor life in Manchester, formulated an atomic theory to explain chemical reactions, on which much of modern chemistry and physics is based.

The world's first intercity passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester, opened in 1830. Stockport-born engineer Joseph Whitworth created a standard system of screw threads for nuts and bolts that allowed components to become interchangeable, enabling mass production. In the 20th century, designer Roy Chadwick created the legendary Lancaster bomber, helping Britain and its allies to win the Second World War.

And then there are scientists you may never have heard of such as Kathleen Drew Baker, a star botanist who made breakthroughs in cultivation of seaweed, used as food in Japan, for which grateful farmers commemorate her as "Mother of the Sea".