Josiah Mason (1795-1881), the son of a carpet weaver, was born a pauper in Kidderminster. In his youth, he worked as a street hawker, shoemaker, carpet weaver, baker, carpenter, painter and blacksmith.

He eventually achieved success in his mid-thirties as a manufacturer of split rings which he mass-produced at lower prices than his competitors with new stamping machinery.

Once established in business, he designed a new range of steel pens with detachable nibs that could be cheaply mass-produced. As a result, he cornered around 20% of the global pen trade and became a millionaire.

He also bought a 33% share in the Elkington Works which used new electro-plating technology to cheaply coat metal objects with thin layers of silver.

Having become one of the wealthiest men in England, Josiah Mason built an orphanage and almshouses at Erdington and established Mason Science College, the forerunner of the University of Birmingham.

William Murdoch (1754-1839) was the son of a Scottish millwright; he excelled in mathematics as a child and as a young man walked 300 miles to Birmingham to ask the famous steam engineer James Watt for a job.

After serving his apprenticeship, Murdoch made several improvements to Watt's engines. He also created the first working model of a steam carriage, designed some of the world's first marine steam engines, invented iron cement for hard durable seals and developed British isingglass, a compound used to purify beer. However, he is best known as the inventor of the gaslight.

William Murdoch eventually became a partner in the firm of Boulton & Watt but despite his inventive genius, he could not save the company from commercial decline after the death of its founding members.

In order to meet demand, Nettlefold shifted production to a steam mill on Broad Street in Birmingham and entered into partnership with his brother-in-law Joseph Chamberlain, the father and namesake of the future mayor of Birmingham.

By 1870 the firm of Nettlefold and Chamberlain, then based in Smethwick, was making around two-thirds of the world's screws; in 1902 the company merged with Guest and Keen to become Guest Keen and Nettlefolds, the forerunner of the global engineering conglomerate, GKN plc.

The Nettlefolds remained a prominent Birmingham family; in particular, John Nettlefold (1866-1930), the grandson of John Sutton Nettlefold, campaigned for the demolition of slum housing and built a garden village at Moorpool in Harborne.

As the works foreman, he patented electroplating processes for coating fragile objects with thin layers of precious metals, thus revolutionising the jewellery trade by enabling the mass production of gold and silver plated trinkets.

He also patented a process for the economically-viable extraction of silver from lead and invented Parkesine, the world's first thermoplastic and the forerunner of celluloid.

Parkes established his own factory manufacturing Parkesine at Hackney Wick in London. However, this venture failed because Parkesine was highly inflammable, too expensive to mass-produce, and prone to cracking.

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was a scientist, natural philosopher, religious and political theorist. He conducted early electrical experiments and is credited with the discovery of oxygen and soda water.

Priestley believed that Christianity should not be taught as a dogmatic creed dependent on formulaic ritual and blind faith but should be viewed in the context of the natural world and in a manner consistent with scientific and rational thought.

He established Unitarianism in England and attacked the error and superstition that he believed were inherent in the Church of England.

Priestley lived in Birmingham from 1780 until 1791. He was a member of the Lunar Society and a close friend of Mathew Boulton and other leading dissenters.

He was forced to flee Birmingham during the Priestley Riots of 1791 after he had publicly celebrated the anniversary of the French Revolution. His mansion, which stood on what is now Priestley Road in Sparkbrook, was razed to the ground.

Although trading in slaves had been outlawed in 1807, slavery itself was not abolished in the British Empire until 1834 when it was replaced by a scheme of twelve-yearly indentured apprenticeships (i.e. bonded labour).

Joseph Sturge established the Anti-Slavery Society and led the campaign against bonded labour. He also helped to establish Free Villages, including Sturge Town in Jamaica, so that ex-slaves could live independently of their former masters.  As a result of his efforts, the indentured apprenticeship scheme was abolished on 1 August 1838.

The Sturge Memorial was erected at 1 Hagley Road in Five Ways in 1862, three years after his death.

In 1519 he was appointed Bishop of Exeter by his mentor Cardinal Wolsey. The bishopric came with annual church revenues of around £1,500 - a vast sum in the Tudor period.

Vesey built a large mansion known as Moor Hall near Sutton Coldfield. He also invested heavily in his hometown, rebuilding the aisles of Holy Trinity Church, reviving the markets, paving the streets, building two stone bridges and fifty one stone houses and establishing a grammar school.

He also persuaded King Henry VIII to give Sutton Park, then a royal hunting ground, to the people of Sutton Coldfield.

Bishop Vesey survived the fall of Cardinal Wolsley in 1529 and skilfully negotiated a substantial pension in return for surrendering his bishopric to Thomas Cromwell. His remains are interred in Holy Trinity Church.

James Watt (1736-1819) trained as an instrument maker and set up a workshop in Glasgow University.

He experimented with steam engines and made the critical breakthrough of separating the condenser and cylinder so that the cold water which condensed the steam would not also diminish the heat that created it.

He also worked out how to transfer steam from the cylinder to the condenser by means of a vacuum.

The process of building prototypes and patenting the invention was too expensive for Watt's first sponsor, John Roebuck, so he moved to Birmingham and entered into partnership with Mathew Boulton.

Once there, he made a series of improvements to his engine, most notably by inventing the "sun and planet gear", so that it could generate rotational power for grinding, weaving and milling.

Boulton & Watt manufactured industrial steam engines at the Soho Foundry in Smethwick from the 1790's onwards whereupon steam rapidly replaced water as the power behind the industrial revolution.

The Webster's had operated blade mills in and around Sutton Coldfield for a century before Joseph Webster IV was born in 1815. His great-grandfather had acquired Penns Hall in Walmley in 1750 and established a wire-drawing business there, building mills and workers' cottages alongside Plants Brook.

By 1815, Penns Hall was a substantial mansion and the Webster's were one of the leading families in Sutton Coldfield. Joseph Webster IV inherited the wire-drawing business which he expanded, increasing his workforce to over 150 by 1851.

This modest success was converted into a vast fortune by a shrewd merger with a new wire-drawing business in Hay Mills (now in south-east Birmingham) whose owner, James Horsfall, had patented a revolutionary form of high tensile steel wire.

The merged firm of Horsfall and Webster cornered the world market in wire-based products such as fish hooks, coat hangars and piano wires and also developed new heavy-duty wire for large-scale engineering projects such as the first Transatlantic Cable.