Customer Reviews

A Century of Innovation: The Engineering That Transformed Our Lives

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This is the story of the most remarkable improvement in living conditions in the history of mankind, which occurred during the 20th Century.

The achievements discussed are:

Electrification
Automobile
Airplane
Water supply and distribution
Electronics
Radio and television
Agricultural mechanization
Computers
Telephony
Air conditioning and refrigeration
Highways
Spacecraft
Internet
Imaging
Household appliances
Health technologies
Petroleum and Petrochemical industries
Lasers and fiber optics
Nuclear technologies
High performance materials

Each accomplishment is presented in narrative form with interesting insights. For example:

*Farm machinery reduced the labor to produce 100 bushels of corn from 35 to 40 hours in 1900 to 2 hours 45 minutes in 1999.

*The physics behind the invention of the laser was based on a 1917 paper by Albert Einstein that proposed that an atom properly excited by external energy would produce a photon equal in frequency and direction to an existing photon.

*Fiber optics required glass with essentially zero impurities.

*Before paved roads fruit could be shipped across the country by railroad cheaper than transporting it 15 miles by horse drawn wagon.

*The introduction of chlorinated water in the first decades of the 20th Century led to a dramatic decline in deaths from cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

Each achievement also has a timeline of key developments, typically written over some type of illustration such as a process diagram.

This is a non-technical book; however, as an engineer myself I believe that it does an excellent job of explaining the accomplishments.

This is a very well organized and written book and is beautifully illustrated. The large "coffee table" format with expensive paper and printing puts it out of the popular price range. I believe that a scaled down edition would make an excellent textbook, which I consider to be essential reading for many fields, such as economics or first year engineering students.

I bought this book because I am an amateur economist doing research on 20th Century productivity, for which I found much valuable information, plus a very interesting read.

One thing I found disappointing was the lack of references, which is surprising because this book was the product of a joint effort of various professional engineering, science and technology societies coordinated by National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. Footnotes for the not so well known details from corporate archives and such would have been tremendously helpful to researchers and historians.