Richard Beatty

Technology and invention
Richard Beatty - writer and editor

At various points in my career I’ve focused specifically on books dealing with technology and invention. As an editor in this area I have experience of large reference projects aimed at a popular readership including children. As a result, I believe I have special skills for organizing many different areas of technology into a single work so as to bring out the historical and other connections between them.

I worked as an in-house editor on two major technology encyclopedias aimed at the general reader. These are:

  • The Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia of Invention and Technology (OUP, 1992)
  • The Encyclopedia of Technology and Applied Sciences (11 volumes: Marshall Cavendish, 2000)

In both cases I was the main person responsible for choosing the topics and article titles to appear in the encyclopedias, length-grading articles for commissioning purposes, providing guidance notes for authors, and optimizing the system of cross-references.

On the historically organized work Inventions & Inventors (10 volumes: Grolier/Brown Reference Group, 2000) I not only helped plan the series but also wrote the chapters on metalworking, agriculture, water technologies, and lighting and heating. I also contributed biographical articles to Marshall Cavendish’s Inventors and Inventions set (5 volumes: 2008). More recently I wrote the glossary for Dorling Kindersley’s The Aircraft Book (2013).