Best History of Technology Books
Here you will get Best History of Technology Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War
Author: by Jeff Shesol
English
416 pages
1324003243
One of the Washington Post’s 20 Books to Read This Summer A riveting history of the epic orbital flight that put America back into the space race. If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth?
That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold Wara perilous time when the Soviet Union built the wall in Berlin, tested nuclear bombs more destructive than any in history, and beat the United States to every major milestone in space.
The race to the heavens seemed a race for survivaland America was losing. On February 20, 1962, when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the free world and renew America’s sense of self-belief.
Mercury Rising re-creates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to the moon. Drawing on new archival sources, personal interviews, and previously unpublished notes by Glenn himself, Mercury Rising reveals how the astronaut’s heroics lifted the nation’s hopes in what Kennedy called the “hour of maximum danger.” 16 pages of illustrations
2. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
Author: by Margot Lee Shetterly
William Morrow Paperbacks
English
368 pages
The #1 New York Times bestseller The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in spacea powerful, revelatory history essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America.
The basis for the smash Academy Award-nominated film starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as human computers used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff.
3. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Author: by Adam Higginbotham
Simon & Schuster
English
560 pages
A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling account that reads almost like the script for a movie (The Wall Street Journal)a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history’s worst nuclear disasters.
Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world.
But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand.
4. Thunderstruck
Author: by The #1 New York Times bestselling author Erik Larson
B000JMKR4S
Crown (October 24, 2006)
October 24, 2006
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s great hush. In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two menHawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communicationwhose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed; and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth.
Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, the kindest of men, nearly commits the perfect murder.
5. From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
Author: by John Sedgwick
English
352 pages
1982104287
A sweeping and lively history of one of the most dramatic stories never toldof the greatest railroad war of all time, fought by the daring leaders of the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande to seize, control, and create the American West.
It is difficult to imagine now, but for all of its cloudy peaks and gorgeous coastline, the American West might have been barren tundra as far as most Americans knew well into the 19th century. While gauzy advertising promotions of the West as a paradise on earth intrigued citizens in the East and Midwest, many believed the journey too hazardous to be worthwhileuntil 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad changed the face of transportation.
Railroad companies soon became the rulers of western expansion, choosing routes, creating brand-new railroad towns, and building up remote settlements like Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Diego, and El Paso into proper cities. But thinning federal grants left the routes incomplete, an opportunity that two brash new railroad men, armed with private investments and determination to build an empire across the Southwest clear to the Pacific, soon seized, leading to the greatest railroad war in American history.
6. The Substance of Civilization: Materials and Human History from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon
Author: by Stephen L. Sass
B06XQ583WV
Arcade
September 28, 2011
The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages.
Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires. How would history have unfolded without glass, paper, steel, cement, or gunpowder? The impulse to master the properties of our material world and to invent new substances has remained unchanged from the dawn of time; it has guided and shaped the course of history.
Sass shows us how substances and civilizations have evolved together. In antiquity, iron was considered more precious than gold. The celluloid used in movie film had its origins in the search for a substitute for ivory billiard balls. The same clay used in the pottery of antiquity has its uses in today’s computer chips.
Moving from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon, from the days of prehistoric survival to the cutting edge of nanotechnology, this fascinating and accessible book connects the worlds of minerals and molecules to the sweep of human history, and shows what materials will dominate the century ahead.
7. How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
Author: by Ryan North
Riverhead Books
English
480 pages
“How to Invent Everything is such a cool book. It’s essential reading for anyone who needs to duplicate an industrial civilization quickly.” -Randall Munroe, xkcd creator and New York Times-bestselling author of What If? The only book you need if you’re going back in timeWhat would you do if a time machine hurled you thousands of years into the past…And then broke?
How would you survive? Could you improve on humanity’s original timeline? And how hard would it be to domesticate a giant wombat? With this book as your guide, you’ll survive-and thrive-in any period in Earth’s history. Bestselling author and time-travel enthusiast Ryan North shows you how to invent all the modern conveniences we take for granted-from first principles.
This illustrated manual contains all the science, engineering, art, philosophy, facts, and figures required for even the most clueless time traveler to build a civilization from the ground up. Deeply researched, irreverent, and significantly more fun than being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, How to Invent Everything will make you smarter, more competent, and completely prepared to become the most important and influential person ever.
8. Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age
Author: by David A. Price
Knopf (June 22, 2021)
English
256 pages
The dramatic, untold story of the brilliant team whose feats of innovation and engineering created the world’s first digital electronic computerdecrypting the Nazis’ toughest code, helping bring an end to WWII, and ushering in the information age. Planning the invasion of Normandy, the Allies knew that decoding the communications of the Nazi high command was imperative for its success.
But standing in their way was an encryption machine they called Tunny (British English for tuna), which was vastly more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma cipher. To surmount this seemingly impossible challenge, Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker, brought in a maverick English working-class engineer named Tommy Flowers who devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that would calculate at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time.
Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman, Flowers and his team producedagainst the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadershipColossus, the world’s first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end. Drawing upon recently declassified sources, David A.
9. The Right Stuff
Author: by Tom Wolfe
B00139XSBA
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 16, 2004
From “America’s nerviest journalist” (Newsweek)-a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. “Tom Wolfe at his very best” (The New York Times Book Review)Millions of words have poured forth about man’s trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves – in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth.
It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.
10. The Wright Brothers
Author: by David McCullough
Simon & Schuster
English
336 pages
The #1 New York Times bestseller from David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prizethe dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to flyWilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothersbicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohiochanged history.
But it would take the world some time to believe that the age of flight had begun, with the first powered machine carrying a pilot. Orville and Wilbur Wright were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity.
When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education and little money never stopped them in their mission to take to the air.
Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off, they risked being killed. In this enjoyable, fast-paced tale (The Economist), master historian David McCullough shows as never before how two Ohio boys from a remarkable family taught the world to fly (The Washington Post) and captures the marvel of what the Wrights accomplished (The Wall Street Journal).
11. The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
Author: by Virginia Postrel
English
320 pages
1541617606
From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide. The story of humanity is the story of textiles – as old as civilization itself. Since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, business, politics, and culture.
In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world.
Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code. Assiduously researched and deftly narrated, The Fabric of Civilization tells the story of the world’s most influential commodity.
12. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
Author: by Gretchen Bakke
Bloomsbury USA
English
384 pages
The National Book Awardwinning epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal, a first-rate drama of the bold and brilliant engineering feat that was filled with both tragedy and triumph, told by master historian David McCullough. From the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal.
In The Path Between the Seas, acclaimed historian David McCullough delivers a first-rate drama of the sweeping human undertaking that led to the creation of this grand enterprise. The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale.
14. On War, Indexed Edition
Author: by Carl von Clausewitz
Princeton University Press
English
732 pages
On War is the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. Since the work’s first appearance in 1832, it has been read throughout the world, and has stimulated generations of soldiers, statesmen, and intellectuals.
15. Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (Rutgers University Press Classics)
Author: by John Drury Clark
English
302 pages
0813595835
This newly reissued debut book in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint is the story of the search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. This search was a hazardous enterprise carried out by rival labs who worked against the known laws of nature, with no guarantee of success or safety.
Acclaimed scientist and sci-fi author John Drury Clark writes with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy about the development of the explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise which eventually took men to the moon, missiles to the planets, and satellites to outer space.
A classic work in the history of science, and described as a good book on rocket stuffthat’s a really fun one by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, readers will want to get their hands on this influential classic, available for the first time in decades.
16. How Technology Works: The Facts Visually Explained (How Things Work)
Author: by DK
DK
English
256 pages
Have you ever asked yourself how the inventions, gadgets, and devices that surround us actually work? Discover the hidden workings of everyday technology with this graphic guide. How Technology Works demystifies the machinery that keeps the modern world going, from simple objects such as zip fasteners and can openers to the latest, most sophisticated devices of the information age, including smartwatches, personal digital assistants, and driverless cars.
It includes inventions that have changed the course of history, like the internal combustion engine, as well as technologies that might hold the key to our future survival, including solar cells and new kinds of farming to feed a growing population.
Throughout the book, step-by-step explanations are supported by simple and original graphics that take devices apart and show you how they work. The opening chapter explains principles that underpin lots of devices, from basic mechanics to electricity to digital technology.
