In this paper, I explore the alleged relation between knowledge, wealth and historical development in this middle-class attempts to calm down potential violent protests against the introduction of machinery in the second quarter of nineteenth century England. I will do so by analysing the two most famous of editor, publisher, and public educator Charles Knight’s own writings, The Result of Machinery (1831) and The Rights of Industry (1831). It is my argument that political economy came to deliver the theory of history and historical progress that forms the platform on which Knight explained the nature of technological, economic, and moral progress. The three key elements in Knight’s idea of progress in prosperity of all classes of society were: teaching of scientific knowledge, the principle of division of labour, and the security of private property. The introduction of new machinery in manufactures and agricultural production during the first decades of the nineteenth century was met with both high expectations and fierce resistance. It was the task of the emerging discipline of political economy to deliver the theoretical explanation of the social change that followed the extensive use of machinery. Additionally, as Maxine Berg has demonstrated in her book The Machinery Question and Making of Political Economy (1980) this very task also became formative for the new discipline. Below the level of abstract theory middle-class reformers, as a response to the changes in the labour marked, set out to educate the working classes in what they labelled “scientific” and “useful” knowledge. The intention was to help the lower classes to be able to help themselves. These middle-men, or, in the words of Austrian-British economist Friedrich von Hayek, ‘second-hand dealer in ideas’ drew heavily on political economy in their legitimation of machinery and their advocacy for public science education. Charles Knight, publisher of most of the works of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, can, I will argue, be seen as a ‘second-hand dealer in ideas’ within the context of responding to the working classes’ concerns for their livelihood and the eradication of traditional forms of employment and ways of life.