Synopses & Reviews
From flint ax heads to the Internet, from Persian ice cream to the microchip,
A History of Great Inventions by the award-winning inventor James Dyson celebrates the greatest achievements of the human imagination since early hominids turned stone into tools about 250,000 years ago. Packed with color illustrations and abundant in wit, this engaging volume surveys the thousands of years and vital inventions more the canoe, the wheel, ink, papyrus, language, maps, currency, law that transformed the primitive hunter-gatherer of the Stone Age into the literate citizen of ancient Rome.
Dyson's lively narrative also features such towering figures as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Gutenberg, and Roger Bacon whose inventions of the thermometer, printing press, and gunpowder significantly altered life in Renaissance Europe, as did more humble contrivances like the fork, toothbrush, button, flushing toilet, and condom. Throughout the seventeenth century and on through the age of industrial power, the age of electricity, the atomic age, and the postwar world of animal cloning and the genome, the human genius for invention, Dyson shows, continues to be characterized as much by the truly momentous as by the modestly utilitarian as much by the steam engine as safety matches, the locomotive as the lawnmower, the X ray as the paper clip, the atom bomb as the bra.
Not only does Dyson's chronicle present more than 500 human inventions, it also explores the circumstances and impulses that prod inventive genius. Necessity often proves to be the mother of invention, but so do frustration, fear, greed, lust, altruism, and, of couse, serendipity. So it was that the cocklebur seeds which by chance stuck to George de Mestral's jacket resulted in the invention of Velcro. In these pages, too, you will learn how Roman dentists developed rope-powered drills, how the hovercraft emerged from an empty cat food can, and how women's corsets led to the invention of the umbrella.
The American inventor Thomas Edison famously observed that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent persperation. This book applauds that one percent, for it has shaped the world we know today and will mold the one we inhabit tomorrow.
About the Author
James Dyson, chairman of the Design Museum in London since 1999, is the award-winning designer of the Sea Truck and the inventor of such products as the revolutionary Ballbarrow and the Dual Cyclone DC01, which is now Britain's most popular vacuum cleaner. He lives in England.