An approachable, accessible history of timekeeping and the impact of the increasing precision and accuracy of time on humanity. Western culture has been obsessed with regulating society by the precise, accurate measurement of time since the Middle Ages. In On Time, Ken Mondschein explores the paired development of concepts and technologies of timekeeping with human thought. Without clocks, he argues, the modern world as we know it would not exist. From the astronomical timekeeping of the ancient world to the tower clocks of the Middle Ages to the seagoing chronometer, the quartz watch, and the atomic clock, greater precision and accuracy have had profound effects on human society-which, in turn, has driven the quest for further precision and accuracy. This quest toward automation-which gave rise to the Gregorian calendar, the factory clock, and even the near-disastrous Y2K bug-has led to profound social repercussions and driven the creation of the modern scientific mindset. Surveying the evolution of the clock from prehistory to the twenty-first century, Mondschein explains how both the technology and the philosophy behind Western timekeeping regimes came to take over the entire world. On Time is a story of thinkers, philosophers, and scientists, and of the thousand decisions that continue to shape our daily lives.

William Swainson F. R. S., was recognised principally as a zoologist, an ornithologist and a skilled and prolific illustrator. He also had a tremendous enthusiasm for seeking and identifying new species. In this 1834 volume however, Swainson addressed the nature of, foundations for and successful pursuit of zoology. It argues firmly for the key importance of taxonomy. Swainson was an ardent advocate of MacLeay's now entirely outmoded 'quinary' system of classification - even then a distinctly minority view. This sought affinities, patterns and analogies among organisms, in order to discern God's order. More than a mere curiosity, such work was of pivotal concern to enterprising naturalists of the 1820s and 1830s - including the young Charles Darwin. It also reached Robert Chambers, whose 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was an important landmark in the development of the theory of evolution.

In 1832, William MacGillivray published this abridged version of the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799 1804, which had appeared in a seven-volume English translation between 1814 and 1829. MacGillivray's edition, intended for the general public, also includes Humboldt's accounts of his explorations of the Ural Mountains and Caspian Sea. Humboldt became a major figure in physical geography as a result of his arduous five-year trip to explore Central and South America. This book offers a brief biographical sketch of the scientist and covers his exciting journeys from the Island of Tenerife across the Atlantic Ocean to Caracas, and up the Orinoco River by canoe. Humboldt fights mosquitoes in dense rain forests and climbs Andean peaks in Peru without mountain gear, taking detailed notes at every stage.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 1913) is regarded as the co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution. It was an essay which Wallace sent in 1858 to Darwin (whom he greatly admired and to whom he dedicated his most famous book, The Malay Archipelago) which impelled Darwin to publish an article on his own long-pondered theory simultaneously with that of Wallace. As a travelling naturalist and collector in the Far East and South America, Wallace already inclined towards the Lamarckian theory of transmutation of species, and his own researches convinced him of the reality of evolution. On the publication of On the Origin of Species, Wallace became one of its most prominent advocates, and Darwinism, published in 1889, supports the theory and counters many of the arguments put forward by scientists and others who opposed it.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 1913) is regarded as the co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution. It was an essay which Wallace sent in 1858 to Darwin (to whom he had dedicated his most famous book, The Malay Archipelago) which impelled Darwin to publish an article on his own long-pondered theory simultaneously with that of Wallace. As a travelling naturalist and collector in the Far East and South America, Wallace already inclined towards the Lamarckian theory of transmutation of species, and his own researches convinced him of the reality of evolution. On the publication of On the Origin of Species, Wallace became one of its most prominent advocates. This second, corrected, edition (1871) of a series of essays published in book form in 1870, shows the development of his thinking about evolution, and emphasises his admiration for, and support of, Darwin's work.

John Fleming (1785 1857) was a minister of the Church of Scotland, but in his time at the University of Edinburgh he had also studied geology and zoology. In the tradition of the country parson who was also a talented and knowledgeable naturalist, he published his first works on the geology of the Shetland Islands while serving there as a minister. His subsequent works led to his being offered the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and subsequently at the newly created chair of natural history at the Free Church College in Edinburgh. The two-volume Philosophy of Zoology was published in 1822, and the young Charles Darwin is recorded as borrowing it from the library of Edinburgh University in 1825/6. His intention in the book was to 'collect the truths of Zoology within a small compass, and to render them more intelligible, by a systematical arrangement'.

John Fleming (1785 1857) was a minister of the Church of Scotland, but in his time at the University of Edinburgh he had also studied geology and zoology. In the tradition of the country parson who was also a talented and knowledgeable naturalist, he published his first works on the geology of the Shetland Islands while serving there as a minister. His subsequent works led to his being offered the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and subsequently at the newly created chair of natural history at the Free Church College in Edinburgh. The two-volume Philosophy of Zoology was published in 1822, and the young Charles Darwin is recorded as borrowing it from the library of Edinburgh University in 1825/6. His intention in the book was to 'collect the truths of Zoology within a small compass, and to render them more intelligible, by a systematical arrangement'.

Valuable reference to rudder markings of many pilots, including aircraft type and unit.

All life on earth is dependent on energy from the sun, but one species has evolved to be especially efficient in tapping that supply. This is the story of the human species and its dedicated effort to sustain and elevate itself by making the earth s stores of energy its own. A story of slow evolutionary change and sharp revolutionary departures, it takes readers from the origins of the species to our current fork in the road.

With a winning blend of wit and insight, Alfred W. Crosby reveals the fundamental ways in which humans have transformed the world and themselves in their quest for energy. When they first started, humans found fuel much like other species in the simple harvesting of wild plants and animals. A major turn in the human career came with the domestication of fire, an unprecedented achievement unique to the species. The greatest advantage from this breakthrough came in its application to food. Cooking vastly increased the store of organic matter our ancestors could tap as food, and the range of places they could live. As they spread over the earth, humans became more complicated harvesters, negotiating alliances with several other species plant and animal leading to the birth of agriculture and civilizations. For millennia these civilizations tapped sun energy through the burning of recently living biomass wood, for instance. But humans again took a revolutionary turn in the last two centuries with the systematic burning of fossilized biomass. Fossil fuels have powered our industrial civilization and in turn multiplied our demand for sun energy. Here we are then, on the verge of exceeding what the available sources of sun energy can conventionally afford us, and suffering the ill effects of our seemingly insatiable energy appetite. A found of the field of global history, Crosby gives a book that glows with illuminating power."

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), prominent astronomer and world-renowned socialist theorist, stood at the nexus of the revolutions in politics, science and the arts of the early twentieth century. His astronomy was uniquely visual and highly innovative, while his politics were radical. Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society collects essays on Pannekoek and his contemporaries at the crossroads of political history, the history of science and art history.

This book demonstrates that American agricultural development was far more dynamic than generally portrayed. In the two centuries before World War II, a stream of biological innovations revolutionized the crop and livestock sectors, increasing both land and labor productivity. Biological innovations were essential for the movement of agriculture onto new lands with more extreme climates, for maintaining production in the face of evolving threats from pests, and for the creation of the modern livestock sector. These innovations established the foundation for the subsequent Green and Genetic Revolutions. The book challenges the misconceptions that, before the advent of hybrid corn, American farmers single-mindedly invested in labor-saving mechanical technologies and that biological technologies were static.

A celebration culture and technology, as seen through the history of the humble yet ubiquitous toothpick, from the best-selling author of "The Pencil."
From ancient Rome, where emperor Nero made his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth, to nineteenth-century Boston, where Charles Forster, the father of the American wooden toothpick industry, ensured toothpicks appeared in every restaurant, the toothpick has been an omnipresent, yet often overlooked part of our daily lives. Here, with an engineer's eye for detail and a poet's flair for language, Henry Petroski takes us on an incredible tour of this most interesting invention. Along the way, he peers inside today's surprisingly secretive toothpick-manufacturing industry, and explores a treasure trove of the toothpick's unintended uses and perils, from sandwiches to martinis and beyond.

How have state policies influenced the development of Japan's telecommunications, computer hardware, computer software, and semiconductor industries and their stagnation since the 1990s? Marie Anchordoguy's book examines how the performance of these industries and the economy as a whole are affected by the socially embedded nature of Japan's capitalist system, which she calls "communitarian capitalism."Reprogramming Japan shows how the institutions and policies that emerged during and after World War II to maintain communitarian norms, such as the lifetime employment system, seniority-based wages, enterprise unions, a centralized credit-based financial system, industrial groups, the main bank corporate governance system, and industrial policies, helped promote high tech industries. When conditions shifted in the 1980s and 1990s, these institutions and policies did not suit the new environment, in which technological change was rapid and unpredictable and foreign products could no longer be legally reverse-engineered.Despite economic stagnation, leaders were slow to change because of deep social commitments. Once the crisis became acute, the bureaucracy and corporate leaders started to contest and modify key institutions and practices. Rather than change at different times according to their specific economic interests, Japanese firms and the state have made similar slow, incremental changes.

Why have cesarean sections become so commonplace in the United States? Between 1965 and 1987, the cesarean section rate in the United States rose precipitously-from 4.5 percent to 25 percent of births. By 2009, one in three births was by cesarean, a far higher number than the 5-10% rate that the World Health Organization suggests is optimal. While physicians largely avoided cesareans through the mid-twentieth century, by the early twenty-first century, cesarean section was the most commonly performed surgery in the country. Although the procedure can be lifesaving, how-and why-did it become so ubiquitous? Cesarean Section is the first book to chronicle this history. In exploring the creation of the complex social, cultural, economic, and medical factors leading to the surgery's increase, Jacqueline H. Wolf describes obstetricians' reliance on assorted medical technologies that weakened the skills they had traditionally employed to foster vaginal birth. She also reflects on an unsettling malpractice climate-prompted in part by a raft of dubious diagnoses-that helped to legitimize "defensive medicine," and a health care system that ensured cesarean birth would be more lucrative than vaginal birth. In exaggerating the risks of vaginal birth, doctors and patients alike came to view cesareans as normal and, increasingly, as essential. Sweeping change in women's lives beginning in the 1970s cemented this markedly different approach to childbirth. Wolf examines the public health effects of a high cesarean rate and explains how the language of reproductive choice has been used to discourage debate about cesareans and the risks associated with the surgery. Drawing on data from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century obstetric logs to better represent the experience of cesarean surgery for women of all classes and races, as well as interviews with obstetricians who have performed cesareans and women who have given birth by cesarean, Cesarean Section is the definitive history of the use of this surgical procedure and its effects on women's and children's health in the United States.

Invention -that single leap of a human mind that gives us all we create. Yet we make a mistake when we call a telephone or a light bulb an invention, says John Lienhard. In truth, light bulbs, airplanes, steam engines-these objects are the end results, the fruits, of vast aggregates of invention. They are not invention itself. In How Invention Begins, Lienhard reconciles the ends of invention with the individual leaps upon which they are built, illuminating the vast web of individual inspirations that lie behind whole technologies. He traces, for instance, the way in which thousands of people applied their combined inventive genius to airplanes, railroad engines, and automobiles. As he does so, it becomes clear that a collective desire, an upwelling of fascination, a spirit of the times-a Zeitgeist -laid its hold upon inventors. The thing they all sought to create was speed itself. Likewise, Lienhard shows that when we trace the astonishingly complex technology of printing books, we come at last to that which we desire from books-the knowledge, the learning, that they provide. Can we speak of speed or education as inventions? To do so, he concludes, is certainly no greater a stretch than it is to call radio or the telephone an "invention." Throughout this marvelous volume, Lienhard illuminates these processes, these webs of insight or inspiration, by weaving a fabric of anecdote, history, and technical detail-all of which come together to provide a full and satisfying portrait of the true nature of invention.

In what Beatriz Sarlo calls six "episodes," ranging from the proto-science fiction of Horacio Quiroga and the apocalyptic urban surrealism of Roberto Arlt through the development of mass media, tales of inventors and inventions, and an entertaining tour of "weird science" and medical quackery, "The Technical Imagination" examines how technology entered the popular imagination in 1920s and 1930s Argentina. Often wry, but always sympathetic, and dispensing erudition with a light touch, Sarlo shows how the products of modern technology (radio, the telephone and telegraph, movies, and rudimentary forays into television, among other phenomena) announced an unprecedented break with the past while also provoking an ironic recrudescence of age-old superstitions. Although the new technologies helped to shape notions of modernity at all levels of Argentine society, Sarlo focuses particularly on the working-class amateur inventors of Buenos Aires, and on how their inventions--even when they failed, as they frequently did--point to what can be recognized today as the reorganization of an intellectual hierarchy, and thus of an era's, and a culture's, intellectual history.

Read Trevor Homer's posts on the Penguin Blog.
Everything--from the mundane (the pencil) to the catastrophic (the atom bomb)--has an origin, but often it's not what we expect. A few things you may not have known:
- Gandhi was married at age thirteen
- Chinese fortune cookies are an American invention and were not eaten in China until the 1990s when they were advertised as "Genuine American Fortune Cookies."
- Bayer lost the trademark for aspirin (which they had held since 1897) as part of the reparations Germany was forced to pay after World War I.
- The original idea for the electric chair came from an American dentist.
For aspiring mindblowers and wanna-be know-it-alls, "The Book of Origins" is a treasure trove of trivia and fascinating facts guaranteed to entertain and enlighten.

This book describes the life and times of fifty-three great British scientists and engineers - male and female inventive geniuses who changed the world, improving the lives of mankind, and propelling humanity forward. Their stories abound with personal ingenuity, brilliance and scientific or engineering wizardry, and with the ambition to satisfy fundamental human needs. The author aspires to set these individual achievements in the socio-political context of their place in history, sometimes embracing the activities of others to round off the story and scientific contribution. Avoiding overly technical language, he nonetheless succeeds in making complex theories and technologies more comprehensible and accessible to a lay audience. This book is a must for all those interested in the prehistory and history of the steam engine, transport, communication technology, public health services, and many topics from the natural sciences. Many of the inventions described in its pages have helped shape the modern world.

Die Informatik selbst ist eine junge Wissenschaft, ihre Wurzeln aber reichen weit in die Vergangenheit zuruck. Der Autor zeigt dies auf unterhaltsame Weise und gleichzeitig mit mathematischer Strenge anhand zahlreicher Facetten aus der Geschichte der Informatik. Die Beitrage sind uber viele Jahre in der Zeitschrift Informatik Spektrum erschienen und erscheinen nun erstmals gesammelt als Buch."

Electrical Engineering The Story of Electrical and Magnetic Measurements From 500 BC to the 1940s Joseph F. Keithley, a modern pioneer of instrumentation, brings you a fascinating history of electrical measurement from the ancient Greeks to the inventors of the 20th century. Written in a direct and fluent style, the book illuminates the lives of the most significant inventors in the field, including Georg Simon Ohm, Andre Marie Ampere, and Jean Baptiste Fourier. Chapter by chapter, meet the inventors in their youth and discover the origins of their lifelong pursuits of electrical measurement. Not only will you find highlights of important technological contributions, you will also learn about the tribulations and excitement that accompanied the discoveries of these early masters. Included are nearly 100 rare photographs from museums around the world. The Story of Electrical and Magnetic Measurements is a "must read" for students and practitioners of physics, electrical engineering, and instrumentation and metrology who want to understand the history behind modern-day instruments.

Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world's most popular video games, including Sid Meier's Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier's Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multi-million-pound industry. Writing with warmth and ironic humour, Meier describes the genesis of his influential studio, MicroProse, founded in 1982 after a trip to a Las Vegas arcade, and recounts the development of landmark games, from vintage classics like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, to Civilization and beyond. Articulating his philosophy that a videogame should be "a series of interesting decisions", Meier also shares his perspective on the history of the industry, the psychology of gamers and fascinating insights into the creative process, including his ten rules of good game design.

The SUPERMEN "After a rare speech at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 1976, programmers in the audience had suddenly fallen silent when Cray offered to answer questions. He stood there for several minutes, waiting for their queries, but none came. When he left, the head of NCAR's computing division chided the programmers. 'Why didn't someone raise a hand?' After a tense moment, one programmer replied, 'How do you talk to God?'" -from The SUPERMEN The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer "They were building revolutionary, not evolutionary, machines...They were blazing a trail-molding science into a product...The freedom to create was extraordinary." -from The Supermen In 1951, a soft-spoken, skinny young man fresh from the University of Minnesota took a job in an old glider factory in St. Paul. Computer technology would never be the same, for the glider factory was the home of Engineering Research Associates and the recent college grad was Seymour R. Cray. During his extraordinary career, Cray would be alternately hailed as "the Albert Einstein," "the Thomas Edison," and "the Evel Knievel" of supercomputing. At various times, he was all three-a master craftsman, inventor, and visionary whose disdain for the rigors of corporate life became legendary, and whose achievements remain unsurpassed. The Supermen is award-winning writer Charles J. Murray's exhilarating account of how the brilliant-some would say eccentric-Cray and his gifted colleagues blazed the trail that led to the Information Age. This is a thrilling, real-life scientific adventure, deftly capturing the daring, seat-of-the-pants spirit of the early days of computer development, as well as an audacious, modern-day David and Goliath battle, in which a group of maverick engineers beat out IBM to become the runaway industry leaders. Murray's briskly paced narrative begins during the final months of the Second World War, when men such as William Norris and Howard Engstrom began researching commercial applications for the code-breaking machines of wartime, and charts the rise of technological research in response to the Cold War. In those days computers were huge, cumbersome machines with names like Demon and Atlas. When Cray came on board, things quickly changed. Drawing on in-depth interviews-including the last interview Cray completed before his untimely and tragic death-Murray provides rare insight into Cray's often controversial approach to his work. Cray could spend exhausting hours in single-minded pursuit of a particular goal, and Murray takes us behind the scenes to witness late-night brainstorming sessions and miraculous eleventh-hour fixes. Cray's casual, often hostile attitude toward management, although alienating to some, was more than a passionate need for independence; he simply thought differently than others. Seymour Cray saw farther and faster, and trusted his vision with an unassailable confidence. Yet he inspired great loyalty as well, making it possible for his own start-up company, Cray Research, to bring the 54,000-employee conglomerate of Control Data to its knees. Ultimately, The Supermen is a story of genius, and how a unique set of circumstances-a small-team approach, corporate detachment, and a government-backed marketplace-enabled that genius to flourish. In an atmosphere of unparalleled freedom and creativity, Seymour Cray's vision and drive fueled a technological revolution from which America would emerge as the world's leader in supercomputing.