We all know South Africa has problems; we read about them in the newspapers, we see them on the streets and many people experience them in their daily lives. Fortunately, many of these problems can be solved using innovation and science. Innovation takes a look at inventions - developed in South Africa by South Africans - to address issues in the areas of healthcare, energy, environment and industry. Some of these inventions, such as a tea bag created to filter water for communities in rural areas, can save lives; others, such as a unique way to beneficiate titanium, could spell a new era of industry in the country.

The book is broken down into sections on environment, health, energy, industry and education, and in each of those parts are examples of South African innovations, from a satellite system to map fires to the concept of sterilising mosquitoes to stop the spread of malaria.

These have been developed by numerous organisations and institutions and showcase South Africa's excellence.

Previously published in paperback as October Sky. Three years in the life of Homer `Sonny' Hickam, from the moment he sees the Sputnik satellite overhead in West Virginia to his successful launch of a prizewinning rocket. In 1957, Coalwood, West Virginia, was a town the post-war boom never quite reached, and dominated by the black steel towers of the mine. For fourteen-year-old Homer `Sonny' Hickam there are only two routes in life: a college football scholarship, or a life underground. But from the moment the town turns out to watch the world's first space satellite, Sputnik, as it passes overhead, Sonny and his friends embark on a mission of their own - to form the Big Creek Missile Agency, and build a rocket. Looking back after a distinguished career as a NASA engineer, Homer Hickam tells the warm, vivid story of youth and ambition that inspired the 1999 film October Sky. It is the tale of a group of teenage boys who dared to imagine a life beyond the confines of the coal pit, and went on to design, build and launch the rockets that would change their lives, and their town, forever.

A fascinating journey through the history of railways, packed with first-hand accounts of innovation, triumph, and tragedy. From the earliest steam engine to the high-speed bullet trains of today, A Short History of the Railway reveals the hidden stories of railway history across the world - the inspired engineering; the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the construction of the tracks; the ground-breaking innovations behind the trains that travelled along them; and the triumphs and tragedies of the people who made the railway what it is. Chart the history of the Trans-Siberian railway, the Orient Express, and Maglev trains and the impact of world events on the development of trains and the railway. Explore the pioneering railway lines that crossed continents, the key trains of each era, and the locomotives that changed the world. A riveting narrative packed with photographs, diagrams, and maps to illustrate and illuminate, this is the biography of the machines that carried us into the modern era.

On the prairies of North America, wind and water were pervasive, but whereas wind was tangible, water in quantity was hidden beneath the surface. The vast grasslands fed great herds of animals, which in turn sustained Native Americans, but it was not until water could be brought to the surface that the plains could be cultivated and developed into a great agricultural bread-basket for the growing nation. The self-governing windmill forever changed the culture of this vast region. In Windmill Tales, in nearly one hundred beautiful full-color images, photographer Wyman Meinzer shows American windmills as they appear today. Many of them are still working, and others have fallen or are preserved at the American Wind Power Center in Lubbock, Texas, but all illustrate the way of life that was made possible by the windmill. Brief reminiscences and stories told by visitors to the American Wind Power Center give the reader a sense of the central importance of windmills in the lives of early pioneers in the West. Some of the stories reflect the sense of humour ranch and farm families developed to help them through hard times, whereas others hint at disappointment and tragedy. Together with the photographs they give us a fascinating insight into our history.

In 1919, in the wake of the First World War, a group of extraordinary women came together to create the Women's Engineering Society. They were trailblazers, pioneers and boundary breakers, but many of their stories have been lost to history. To mark the centenary of the society's creation, Magnificent Women and Their Revolutionary Machines brings them back to life. Their leaders were Katharine and Rachel Parsons, wife and daughter of the engineering genius Charles Parsons, and Caroline Haslett, a self-taught electrical engineer who campaigned to free women from domestic drudgery and became the most powerful professional woman of her age. Also featured are Eleanor Shelley-Rolls, sister of car magnate Charles Rolls; Viscountess Rhondda, a director of thirty-three companies who founded and edited the revolutionary Time and Tide magazine; and Laura Willson, a suffragette and labour rights activist from Halifax, who was twice imprisoned for her political activities. This is not just the story of the women themselves, but also the era in which they lived. Beginning at the moment when women in Britain were allowed to vote for the first time, and to stand for Parliament - and when several professions were opened up to them - Magnificent Women charts the changing attitudes towards women in society and in the workplace.

Abraham Lincoln's two great legacies to history--his extraordinary power as a writer and his leadership during the Civil War--come together in this close study of the President's use of the telegraph. Invented less than two decades before he entered office, the telegraph came into its own during the Civil War. In a jewel-box of historical writing, Wheeler captures Lincoln as he adapted his folksy rhetorical style to the telegraph, creating an intimate bond with his generals that would ultimately help win the war.

This compelling story of exploration charts and celebrates humankind in space, from Sputnik's launch in 1957 through the Apollo Moon landings and the International Space Station to future missions to Mars and beyond. Spaceflight chronicles how, in the six decades that followed Sputnik, the world was revolutionized by space travel and exploration. The opening up of Earth's orbit to satellites led to a revolution in communications, monitoring of the environment, and materials science. For the human imagination, the impact has been even greater - the voyages of robotic space probes have transformed our view of the Solar System, while Earth-orbiting satellites and missions to the Moon have forever changed our view of ourselves. This book is a celebration of human ingenuity and imagination. From the work of pioneers like Wernher von Braun, Yuri Gagarin, and Neil Armstrong to the triumphs and tragedies that followed, it reveals the people, science, and technology that have propelled us into the Space Age.

In 2013 a Dutch scientist unveiled the world's first laboratory-created hamburger, and since then the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab--a substance sometimes called "cultured meat"--and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually be the object of our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? The meat problem is not merely a problem of production. Like all problems in our food system, it is intrinsically social and political, and demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. With cultured meat not yet in supermarkets or restaurants, Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem's capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not "succeed," it functions--much like science fiction--as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.

An eye-opening history of the technology that harnessed electricity and powered the greatest scientific and technological advances of our time.

What begin as a long-running dispute in biology, involving a dead frog's twitching leg, a scalpel, and a metal plate, would become an invention that transformed the history of the world: the battery. Science journalist Henry Schlesinger traces the history of this essential power source and demonstrates its impact on our lives, from Alessandro Volta's first copper-and-zinc model in 1800 to twenty-first-century technological breakthroughs. Schlesinger introduces the charlatans and geniuses, the paupers and magnates, who were attracted to the power of the battery.

In autumn 1933, Albert Einstein found himself living alone in an isolated holiday hut in rural England. There, he toiled peacefully at mathematics while occasionally stepping out for walks or to play his violin. But how had Einstein come to abandon his Berlin home and go `"on the run"? In this lively account, Andrew Robinson tells the story of the world's greatest scientist and Britain for the first time, showing why Britain was the perfect refuge for Einstein from rumored assassination by Nazi agents. Young Einstein's passion for British physics, epitomized by Newton, had sparked his scientific development around 1900. British astronomers had confirmed his general theory of relativity, making him internationally famous in 1919. He was also welcomed by the British people, who helped him campaign against Nazi anti-Semitism. He even intended to become a British citizen. So why did Einstein then leave Britain, never to return to Europe?

Striving to be the best place in the world for people to enjoy science, the Science Museum's world-class collection forms an enduring record of scientific, technological and medical achievements from across the globe. This exciting wall calendar is a celebration of the incredible inventions that have changed the course of mankind. Featuring objects from the Science Museum's collection such as The Wright Brothers' first flight and the discovery of polonium and radium by Marie Curie, take a leap into the past and imagine how we might move forward in the future. Informative text accompanies each invention and the datepad features previous and next month's views. Created by Flame Tree Studio - The Art of Fine Gifts.

'It's rare for a book to make you see the world differently, but this ... does exactly that on almost every page' Guardian

Standard histories of technology give tired accounts of the usual inventions, inventors, and dates, framing technology as the inevitable march of progress. They split history into ages - electrification, motorisation, and computerisation - and rarely ask whether anyone bothered to use these inventions at the time. Shock of the Old is not one of those histories.

I Letters exist alongside emails and outlasted telegrams; we still make physical books and magazines despite the rise of the Internet - a belated rise considering that the technologies that made it possible was invented in 1965, and bookshops thrive despite Amazon. More horses were used in the Second World War than any other war in history and propeller planes continue to take off from the same runways as jets.

Shock of the Old forces us to reassess the significance of old inventions such as corrugated iron and sewing machines and rethink the relative importance we place on the invention of something new, its application, and its widespread adoption. It challenges the idea that we live in an era of ever increasing change and, interweaving political, economic and cultural history, teaches us to think critically about technology.

"One of the best railroad histories, a well-balanced mix of text and photography.... (The book) represents a standard of excellence for this genre, one which few other publications will be able to surpass but all can adopt as an example". -- Railroad History

Possessing the flavor of all scenic New England railroads, the Rutland Railroad ran through Vermont and northern New York for more than a hundred years. Surviving bankruptcy, floods, and strikes, it competed with larger, stronger lines and struggled to operate on a smaller scale. Shaughnessy's The Rutland Road is a sweeping chronicle from preconstruction in 1831 to the twentieth century. Filled with over 500 photographs, the book contains some of the author's finest camera work. It will be of interest to railroad devotees, historians, and photographers.

The Industrial Revolution changed our world in a way that few other periods have done: it changed the landscape with heavy industry, altered a national workforce, linked towns and cities with transport and communication networks and transformed the medical world. In utilising the plentiful supply of fossil fuels it pushed forward locomotion, light, manufacturing and food production to change human lifestyles forever, as urban life took over from rural. Regular wages brought freedom of information, travel and social mobility to many, and the world of 1800 looked vastly different to that of 1700 as the foundations for the modern age were laid. This book celebrates the major inventions and buildings of the period 1700-1860: a period when science and technology began to establish its role in modern life. Landmark innovations and inventions are put in context and explained in detail, from the first iron foundry in 1709 to the monumental Suez Canal in 1859. In between these dates come inventions large and small, including the flying shuttle, Ironbridge, vaccination, the Davy lamp, the hydraulic crane and the first transatlantic cable. Illustrated throughout and with informative and accessible text from author Simon Forty, this book charts a fascinating period of human history and endeavour, which still affects our lives today.

Beatrice Bressan brings together a number of outstanding examples of successful cross-disciplinary technology transfer originating in fundamental physics research, which dramatically impacted scientific progress in areas which changed modern society. Many of them were developed at CERN, a hotbed of fundamental inventions in particle physics. This book deals with breakthrough developments being applied in the world of IT, consumer electronics, aviation, and material sciences. Additional sections of the book deal with knowledge management and technology transfer including their economic aspects. While each chapter has been drafted by an expert in the field, the editor has carefully edited the whole to ensure a coherent overall structure. A must-have for policy makers, technology companies, investors, strategic planners in research and technology, as well as attractive reading for the research community.

"The first biography of the distinguished ornithologist"

George Miksch Sutton (1898-1982) is revered by bird lovers everywhere for his beautiful paintings. A Victorian gentleman, adventurer, and raconteur, he was trained in the sciences but felt equally at home in the arts.

Jerome Jackson, a friend and colleague of Sutton, draws on extant correspondence, interviews, and personal knowledge to offer a portrait of the artist that will surprise those who knew him only in his later years. Capturing a superb ornithologist who worked under the most inhospitable conditions, from the arctic to the tropics, Jackson shows us a person who guarded his privacy and struggled with uncertainty.

Jackson depicts a Renaissance man whose life was, more than a search for birds, a quest for knowledge through science and art in the service of humanity. Tracing Sutton's roots through two generations, Jackson reveals what set him apart from other ornithologists and bird artists. Focusing on Sutton's formative years--how he acquired his love of birds at an early age and how that love guided his life--Jackson then relates Sutton's adventures in the Arctic, Mexico, Oklahoma, and elsewhere.

Jackson's account fills in details missing from Sutton's autobiography, Bird Student. Gracing the book are fifty reproductions of Sutton's art--twenty-eight in full color--including early, unpublished, or obscure works along with non-avian subjects.

The history of the grid, the world's largest interconnected power machine that is North America's electricity infrastructure. The North American power grid has been called the world's largest machine. The grid connects nearly every living soul on the continent; Americans rely utterly on the miracle of electrification. In this book, Julie Cohn tells the history of the grid, from early linkages in the 1890s through the grid's maturity as a networked infrastructure in the 1980s. She focuses on the strategies and technologies used to control power on the grid-in fact made up of four major networks of interconnected power systems-paying particular attention to the work of engineers and system operators who handled the everyday operations. To do so, she consulted sources that range from the pages of historical trade journals to corporate archives to the papers of her father, Nathan Cohn, who worked in the industry from 1927 to 1989-roughly the period of key power control innovations across North America. Cohn investigates major challenges and major breakthroughs but also the hidden aspects of our electricity infrastructure, both technical and human. She describes the origins of the grid and the growth of interconnection; emerging control issues, including difficulties in matching generation and demand on linked systems; collaboration and competition against the backdrop of economic depression and government infrastructure investment; the effects of World War II on electrification; postwar plans for a coast-to-coast grid; the northeast blackout of 1965 and the East-West closure of 1967; and renewed efforts at achieving stability and reliability after those two events.

'The book is a house of wonders' The New York Times 'Steven Johnson is the Darwin of technology' Walter Issacson, author of Steve Jobs What connects Paleolithic bone flutes to the invention of computer software? Or the Murex sea snail to the death of the great American city? How does the bag of crisps you hold in your hand help tell the story of humanity itself? In his brilliant new work on the history of innovation, international bestseller Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder has always been a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. He finds that that throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused. Johnson's storytelling is just as delightful as the inventions he describes, full of surprising stops along the journey from simple concepts to complex modern systems. He introduces us to the colourful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows. Johnson compellingly argues that observers of technological and social trends should be looking for clues in novel amusements. You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.

The New Kingmakers documents the rise of the developer class, and provides strategies for companies to adapt to the new technology landscape. From recruiting to retention, it provides a playbook to work more efficiently and effectively with the most important members of your organization.