Take a look around you--every little object and product has its own story to tell, and here are the most fascinating. (SEE 2 QUOTES.)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"An ideal introduction to the world of inventors and their inventions."
--Booklist
--Booklist
"Lindsay's writing is excellent and often delightfully humorous."
--Library Journal
--Library Journal
From the Back Cover
Take a look around you - every little object and product in your home has its own story to tell, and here are the most fascinating. David Lindsay tours the typical American home to examine the most taken-for-granted objects, and finds incredible stories behind everyday items.
From the intercom, the mailbox, the microwave oven, pencils, ballpoint pens, Scotch tape, and Post-its to the screw thread, the yo-yo, blue jeans, zippers, and even condoms, here are the fascinating stories of the quotidian objects whose history is little known.
From the intercom, the mailbox, the microwave oven, pencils, ballpoint pens, Scotch tape, and Post-its to the screw thread, the yo-yo, blue jeans, zippers, and even condoms, here are the fascinating stories of the quotidian objects whose history is little known.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good history of some things and their inventors,
By A Customer
This review is from: House of Invention: The Extraordinary Evolution of Everyday Objects (Hardcover)
Are all inventors wacky? Well, maybe not all, but certainly some -- and a number of them are detailed here, along with what they invented. Lindsay takes three inventions from each room of the house and discusses them. Some of the info is not terribly new if you read this kind of thing, but I would guess most people don't. Even so, he adds some info not usually found in previous writings about those same inventions.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Panati's 'Extraordinary Origins / Everyday Things' is better,
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This review is from: House of Invention: The Extraordinary Evolution of Everyday Objects (Hardcover)
Lindsay seems to have relied very heavily on Charles Panati's classic "Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things" - still a bestseller. Whereas Lindsay covers a few items, in brief, Panati covers hundreds, and in depth. And, too, Panati's book sets the format of taking you through rooms in a home - bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, etc. - to explain the origins of items found there. I find it strange - troubling, in fact - that in Lindsay's end-of-book "Suggested Further Reading," he lists scores of books, but not Panati's. Then again, maybe it's not so strange after all. Panati's classic is half the price and twice the info and entertainment.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
No one appreciates a genius,
By
This review is from: House of Invention: The Extraordinary Evolution of Everyday Objects (Hardcover)
Suppose you had an old tea chest, a "bull's-eye" lens from a bicycle light, some sealing wax, glue, surplus army wire, knitting needles, a hat box, serrated biscuit tin, ordinary lamp and electric fan -- do you think you could make a basic television set?Scotsman John Logie Baird did, thus inventing the basics of television in 1922. The first TV broadcast was that of a Maltese cross, transmitted a distance of at least two feet. It's one of the delightful stories on the nature of inventions offered by David Lindsay, which is really a series about the oddball habits and ideas of people who invent things. When 16-year-old Polly Jacobs was dressing for an evening party in 1914, she rebelled against the masses of undergarments then worn by all respectable ladies. Her response, Lindsay says, was to tell her maid "Bring me two of my pocket handkerchiefs, and some pink ribbon ... and bring the needle and thread and some pins into my bedroom." A few minutes later, she emerged with the first brassiere. When Thomas Edison wanted to promote the use of direct current and discredit alternating current, his lab paid neighborhood urchins to round up stray dogs and cats. They were then electrocuted with alternating current, or as the media of the day reported, the process was "to be Westinghoused." Lindsay has a keen eye for the little oddities, roadblocks, persistence and showmanship that moves new ideas into popular use; plus, sometimes, the outright theft of new ideas by major corporations. Anyone who's ever come up with a fresh idea can appreciate and sympathize with the fate, follies and fortunes of men and women who never lost faith in their own bright ideas. It's a book about the personality of inventors, which is very different than that of people who merely improve existing products. When King Camp Gillette invented the first disposable razor, he came up with the first new idea in shaving in thousands of years. Invention of the "double blade" is hardly in the same category, despite the fervent pleas of advertising executives. Inventors are oddballs, Lindsay writes, ". . . perhaps it's because human folly is intimately bound up with the actual work of inventing. Doing the `wrong thing,' after all, is not so very different from doing the new thing. "Put the other way around, if so many inventions start as mistakes, it's probably because some humans are especially prone to making them," Lindsay writes. That is the key to his delightful book, a brief survey of 21 everyday items that are so common we scarcely think of them as being "invented." It'll give heart to everyone who's ever wondered about an original idea. Frozen food? Yup. it had to be invented. Clarence Birdseye, spending a winter in northern Canada, saw how quickly fish caught by the Inuit were frozen solid -- and later thawed out and eaten with no loss of taste. For how many thousands of years had that been done? Until Birdseye, no one had figured out it would benefit American households. Of course, Birdseye also had to invent store freezers, and a distribution system to keep food frozen during shipping. Nobody ever said inventing was easy. Now, frozen food is a $10 billion industry. That, so well explained in this book, is how great inventions come to be commonplace.
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