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The Tinkerers - The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great (Hardcover, New)
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The Tinkerers - The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great (Hardcover, New)
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From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of
tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and
were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw.
Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work,
and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and
professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with
the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic
dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question whether our
tinkering spirit has survived the pressures of ruthless corporate
organization and bottom-line driven caution. But as Alec Foege
shows in "The Tinkerers," reports of tinkering's death have been
greatly exaggerated.
Through the stories of great tinkerers and inventions past and
present, Foege documents how Franklin and Edison's modern-day heirs
do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity
to interfere with their passion and creativity. Tinkering has been
the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations
such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale
inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make
low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a
device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the
sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the
world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see
themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of
working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to subvert
the old order, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and
to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day.
As anyone who has feared voiding a warranty knows, the complexity
of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. Despite this,
tinkerers can - and do - come from anywhere, whether it's the
R&D lab of a major corporation, a hobbyist's garage, or a
summer camp for budding engineers. Through a lively retelling of
recent history and captivating interviews with today's most
creative innovators, Foege reveals how the tinkering tradition
remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American
society and culture.
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