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Anyone using a bicycle, car or train relies on the forgotten ingenuity of Philip Vaughan, an ironmaster from the Welsh town of Carmarthen who patented the idea in the 1790s.

Chris Parry, a historian based at the Cyfarthfa Castle Museum in the old ironmaster's baronial mansion showed me the blast furnaces, which still stand, after more than two centuries.

Arnold Palmer used the former, at first with the Tommy Armour Ironmaster, then the Wilson, and finally his own “personal model.”

Danny Boyle's opening ceremony took an unashamed delight in Britain's past glories and nodded to a few of its horrors, from cricket on the village green to the rise of the ironmaster.

In addition to his trade in clocks and watches, Biddle also made mathematical instruments and was well known in his native city as a merchant, inventor, and ironmaster.