Iwan Rhys Morus opens his account of nineteenth-century science and technology with a sort of steampunk set piece. It is July 1909, and King Edward VII and an array of scientific and political worthies have gathered on India’s Deccan Plateau. There, in the culmination of a grand project launched more than twenty years before, they watch as His Majesty’s Spaceship Victorious roars into the sky, carrying three Royal Navy officers on a mission to plant the Union Jack on the Sea of Tranquility and claim the moon for Britain.

In the real world, of course, it would take another sixty years and enormous advances in rocketry, electronics, and other technologies before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would be able to unfurl their flag (American, as it happens, rather than British) on the moon. Impressive as Victorian (and Edwardian) technology was, it was simply not up to the task of carrying men to the moon. But the point of Morus’s fictional scene is that we can imagine the Victorious making such a flight precisely because the Victorians could imagine it. The Victorians foresaw a future of scientific and technological progress in which a trip to the moon was a reasonable, even predictable, prospect. They might not be able to go to the moon themselves, but they fully expected that their not-too-distant descendants—men much like themselves—would be able to do so. In a remark that sums up much of the thrust of his book, Morus declares that the Apollo 11 mission of 1969 “was the culmination of a technological fantasy that began with the Victorians” (287). Moreover, it is a fantasy that is still with us, or at least with many of us. In the twenty-first century, Morus says, many people continue to picture the future much as the Victorians did, and in his “Epilogue” he comes within an inch of identifying Elon Musk as the current embodiment of the Victorian image of the lone hero of technoscience, reaching now toward Mars. As Morus stresses, it is an image that was always mostly fantasy and is now increasingly problematic.

Note that Morus uses Victorian in an expansive sense; some of the main episodes he recounts date from well before Victoria took the throne, and he places his Victorian moon landing eight years after her death. But for Morus, Victorian denotes more a frame of mind and a set of values than a discrete historical period. Those values find expression in several key words that recur throughout his book: discipline, precision, expertise, progress, and empire. As Morus makes clear, the Victorians’ ideal figure was white, male, and masterful, much like the self-made heroes depicted in Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers (1862), men who conquered the world through disciplined expertise and force of will. It was an image that obscured the contributions of the many others whose labors, as Morus emphasizes, were in fact crucial to making those Victorian achievements possible.

Another of Morus’s key words is perhaps more surprising: showmanship. In one of his strongest chapters, “Showing Off,” he draws on his earlier work on the scientific and technological exhibition venues that began to appear in London in the 1820s and 1830s. Here, inventors and scientists (a word that was then just being coined) offered an eager public “glimpses of the future” (127), or at least of the future those inventors and scientists were trying to promote. At the Adelaide Gallery and the Royal Polytechnic, at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, and at the string of world’s fairs that made the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth the Age of Exhibitions, inventions and the promise of technological progress became a new form of popular entertainment, often paired with panoramas of empire. Electrical displays were an especially prominent part of these exhibitions: the Victorian present may have been powered largely by steam, but the future, audiences were told, would be electric. Spectacular electrical demonstrations lent themselves especially well to the kind of showmanship that not only helped scientists and inventors sell the Victorian public on a particular vision of the future but also gave those scientists and inventors a way to stake their claim to credit for their innovations and to standing as the proper heralds of the future.

In chapters on electrical light and power, on telegraphs and telectroscopes (as televisions were then called), and on computing machines and automatons, Morus interweaves accounts of real technologies with those imagined by Jules Verne, George Griffith, and other writers of scientific romances. The interplay between science and science fiction is a major theme of Morus’s book and one he brings to the fore in his penultimate chapter, “Flying High,” on dreams of aircraft and spaceships. This brings him back, of course, to his own foray into fiction, and in his “Epilogue” he treats us to the sight of the three intrepid British selenauts returning from the moon and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

One can quibble with Morus on some points of detail. The “cult of disciplined laboratory work” did not really originate in academic physics laboratories and spread outward, as he claims (110). In fact, physics was rather late to the game of laboratory science, particularly in Britain, and the line of influence in the 1860s and 1870s ran mostly in the opposite direction, from telegraphic testing rooms to university laboratories. There are also some puzzling omissions, notably of the pioneering contributions of Alberto Santos-Dumont to aviation. Such minor points aside, however, Morus has given us a rich and engaging account of how the Victorians “forged the future”—the future in which we now live.