Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale discovers the use of coke in the smelting of pig iron

Thomas Newcomen creates a piston steam engine, with the steam condensed in the cylinder by a jet of cold water

Christopher Wren's new domed St Paul's cathedral is completed in London

Machines are thrown out of the window of a Spitalfields factory, in an early protest against industrialization

The Byerley Turk, Darley Arabian and Godolphin Arabian, ancestors of all thoroughbred racehorses, are imported into England

25-year-old George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

Handel's success in London with his opera Rinaldo prompts him to settle in Britain

Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English poetry

On the death of Queen Anne, the Act of Settlement delivers the British crown to the elector of Hanover, as George I

The British government offers a massive £20,000 prize for a chronometer capable of keeping accurate time at sea

A Jacobite uprising in Scotland on behalf of the Old Pretender ends in fiasco

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel

Shares in the South Sea Company rise rapidly and collapse within the year, in the so-called South Sea Bubble

Robert Walpole becomes Britain's chief minister and holds the post for an unrivalled span of twenty-one years

Jonathan Swift launches his hero on a series of bitterly satirical adventures in Gulliver's Travels

On the death of his father, George I, George II becomes king of Great Britain

Handel composes Zadok the Priest for the crowning of George II, and it has been sung at every subsequent British coronation

John and Charles Wesley form a Holy Club at Oxford which becomes the cradle of Methodism

English maker of telescopes John Hadley designs the instrument which evolves into the standard sextant used at sea

With the performance of Esther Handel taps a rich new vein, the English oratorio

John Kay, working in the Lancashire woollen industry, patents the flying shuttle to speed up weaving

Britain declares war on Spain, partly in a mood of indignation over Captain Jenkins' ear

David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science

Jack Broughton, champion of England, opens an academy to teach 'the mystery of boxing, that wholly British art'

Edmond Hoyle publishes the definitive rules of whist