The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys [Paperback]

James Burke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1997

Using 100s of fascinating examples, James Burke shows how old established ideas in science and technology often lead to serendipitous and amazing modern discoveries and innovations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Follow the bouncing ball, James Burke-style: spice trading in the Middle Ages leads to the European tea-drinking craze, which helps instigate the development of the science of natural history, which in turns inspires the creation of the coal miner's safety lamp, which is somehow related to the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack. From there we go to North Carolina cotton industry, Thomas Edison's very first electric power station, air conditioning, glass manufacturing, and laser beams. The end result? The smart bombs used during the Gulf War. Burke, who wrote Connections (the book and the television show), revels--or better, wallows--in the accidental nature of the march of discovery. Despite a penchant for playing it loose and free with scientific and historical accuracy, Burke has compiled a fascinating look at the great matrix of change and transformation that humans have created for themselves. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Picking up the theme of his bestselling Connections and utilizing cross-chapter margin references that imitate computer hypertext, Burke investigates the dynamic interplay of scientific discovery, technological innovation and social change in a dizzying, mind-expanding adventure that explores the crosscurrents of history. One chapter follows a trail from slavery in America to English Quaker abolitionist Sampson Lloyd's nail-making business to German-American immigrant engineer John Roebling's wire suspension bridges (including the Brooklyn Bridge) to rustproofing with cadmium to nuclear reactors. Accident, luck, greed, ambition and mistakes abound as Scientific American columnist Burke tries to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all things. Another typical chapter unravels the serendipitous interactions among Cyrus Dalkin's invention of carbon paper, Edison's telephone (which used sooty carbon black in the transmitter), the rise of suburbs, X-ray crystallography and DNA. Often as maddening as a pinball game, this nevertheless unique and exciting odyssey may change the way you look at the world. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (August 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316116106
• ISBN-13: 978-0316116107
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #167,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interconnectedness of history, February 19, 1999

By 

Duwayne Anderson (Saint Helens, Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys (Paperback)

Since Chaos burst upon the intellectual consciousness of the twentieth century, examples of the butterfly effect have inundated our lives. Chaotic systems exhibit a type of behavior where vanishingly-small perturbations in initial conditions result in wild and unpredictable alterations in a system's final state. The butterfly in China, flapping its wings, results in a hurricane off the coast of Florida 100 years later.

James Burke takes us on an intersected voyage through the web of history, and in the process shows the intricately connected nature of our lives in a chaotic mishmash of intersecting events. The mental imagery I concocted while reading his book was one of a small worm making its way through a biscuit of shredded wheat. With thousands of intersecting strands, and billions of route possibilities open at each juncture, my biscuit gives a feel for the intricate connection that every event in history shares with everything else. In fact, Burke has written his book from the worm's perspective, with branch points identified in the margins so you can follow a thread (instead of the book) as it weaves its way through history. You do not need to read this book sequentially, and quite possibly might choose to read it worm style rather than cover to cover.

When I first began Burke's book I looked for the obvious connections, but soon learned that was not his objective. Though he illustrates obvious connections, much of the interelatedness in Burke's book deals with subtle effects that changed people's lives and resulted in dramatic changes in history. Sometimes the stories become so intricate I found myself taking notes so I could mentally trace back through the web of events.

Most of the historical events he covers relate in some way to scientific or technical achievements and discoveries. In some of these, I found myself confused about the terminology used. Burke is not always clear when he comments about a particular discovery, whether he is making a statement about the way things are viewed today, or how they were viewed by the original discoverers. Because of this, I found myself sometimes irritated by technically incorrect descriptions. For example, on page 198 Burke says:

"There was only one thing that would reflect radio waves besides metal reflectors like the ones Hertz had used: ionized atoms, which had lost one or more of their electrons. These atoms became positively charged and would reflect electronic signals (which were negative)."

While it is true that ions are positively charged, radio waves are not negative. In another place, he describes voltage as charge (see page 186). He also mentions, off handedly, that collimated laser beams spread by only "a few feet" over the distance between the earth and moon (see page 75). [A collimated beam, with a wavelength of 600 nm, will have a half-beam divergence of about 48 feet over the distance between the earth and moon when collimated with a telescope having a 10-meter-diameter primary mirror. See, for example, Saleh, Teich, "Fundamentals of Photonics," Wiley Series in Pure and applied optics, equation 3.1-20.]

These examples left me with a sometimes uneasy feeling about the book's technical accuracy, yet I cannot discount the possibility that Burke was simply explaining these phenomena in the context of the way they were understood when first discovered.

The book has an excellent index. The figures, however, are of generally poor quality and hard to see. Another irritant was the frequent and often-detailed descriptions Burke gives of ingenious and complex machinery and gadgets. These descriptions are often very hard to follow, and would benefit greatly from drawings that support the textual descriptions.

Aside from these few criticisms, however, I found Burke's book most enjoyable. It will broaden your horizons and make you appreciate history from a new perspective. An ideal book for just before bedtime, I highly recommend it.

Duwayne Anderson

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Pinball Effect - another stellar work by Burke, January 24, 2000

By 

Ric Schmeelk - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys (Paperback)

Although, I'm not even finished yet, I know I'll be re-reading this at some time to take advantage of the inspired gateways scattered throughout the text. I remember watching the original 'Connections' series on PBS years ago, and his work fascinated me even then. This work is easily readable, and makes itself readily available to young and old, the scientifically minded and those just looking for a good read. 'Pinball' is a fun excursion through science, technology, and history! If you don't realize just how connected life is, this book will certainly open your eyes to the web of a world in which we live.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Connection does not equal causation!, June 13, 2001

By 

Katherine Bryant (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys (Paperback)

It's been some time since I read this book, but I was recently reminded of it. I like Burke's pinwheeling (or pinballing, rather) style, jumping from topic to topic and making what are, indeed, often very interesting connections.

The reason I rate this book so low, however, is that often Burke sums up a series of connections by implying -- or sometimes directly stating -- that the first event in the chain caused, by means of the intermediate steps, the last. This is often not at all the case; the connections between steps may have had no causal relationship, but simply meant that a person was working in the same city, or some other such interesting but not causally relevant connection.

So in short, the chains of connections themselves make for fun reading, but don't trust the summaries. "Correlation does not equal causation," to quote an old statistics maxim; in the case of The Pinball Effect, connection doesn't always equal causation, either.