The publication of On the Origin of Species was a remarkable event that changed the world forever, right? Not so, says Macinnis. He argues that Darwin's book was not the cause of change, but a symptom of it – one of the thousands of novel innovations and theories of that slice of the Victorian era.

The book reveals that 1959 was a remarkable year on many accounts, one that somehow crossed a critical threshold to allow inventions and discoveries to suddenly spew forth. It was a year when aluminium became cheaper than gold, and communication and travel sped up beyond past recognition.

Macinnis contends that it was in this year that science started to become so complex that leading experts of different disciplines were unable to understand each other's work – a phenomenon that sounded the death knell for the role of the amateur in science (except, he says, in the field of astronomy, where comets are still discovered by amateurs today).

Perhaps because Macinnis is an Australian science writer, his book doesn't only cite the major European discoveries of the age, but dips into a pool of examples from across the world. Advances in communication, such as telegraph cables, meant that the burst of discovery was a truly worldly phenomenon and marked the beginnings of globalisation.

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