Connections

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Steven Johnson · 293 pages

"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepr

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Charles Petzold · 393 pages

What do flashlights, the British invasion, black cats, and seesaws have to do with computers? In CODE, they show us the ingenious ways we manipulate language and invent new means of communicating with each other. And through CODE, we see how this ingenuity and our very human compulsion to communicate have driven the technological innovations of the past two centuries. Using everyday objects an

The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are.

Henry Petroski · 288 pages

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes · 886 pages

Here for the first time, in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the brig

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick · 526 pages

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Tur

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder · 293 pages

"The Soul of a New Machine" is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Non-fiction and a Pulitzer Prize f

How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery

Kevin Ashton · 325 pages

"Inspiring and empowering, this journey behind the scenes of humanity's greatest creations reveals the surprising way we make something new. What do Thomas Jefferson's ice cream recipe, Coca Cola, and Chanel No. 5 have in common? They all depended on a nineteenth-century African boy who, with a single pinch, solved one of nature's great riddles and gave birth to the multimillion-dollar vanilla ind

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers

John MacCormick · 219 pages

The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World

Jenny Uglow · 608 pages

The Way Things Work: Newly Revised Edition

David Macaulay

A look at how technology impacts our lives. (Ages 11 to 15)

The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work

W. Daniel Hillis · 164 pages

Daniel Hillis offers an easy-to-follow explanation of how data is processed that makes the operation of a computer seem as straightforward as those of a bicycle. Hillis proceeds from an outline of basic logic to clear descriptions of programming languages, algorithms and memory. He then takes readers in simple steps up to the most exciting developments in computing today - quantum computing, paral

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Dava Sobel · 192 pages

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailo

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

Lewis Dartnell · 340 pages

"How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

K. Eric Drexler · 298 pages

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Yuval Noah Harari · 544 pages

From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing head

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

Kevin Kelly · 521 pages

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Simon Singh · 402 pages

In his first book since the bestselling *Fermat's Enigma*, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisit

Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

Steven Kotler · 284 pages

The Ascent of Man

Jacob Bronowski · 448 pages

Traces the development of science and the discoveries that have made man unique among animal species.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World

Christopher Steiner · 252 pages

The interaction of man and machine can make our lives easier. But what will the world look like when algorithms control our hospitals, our roads, our culture, and our national security? It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills--and maybe an advanced degree or two. These d

Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Norbert Wiener · 212 pages

Acclaimed one of the "seminal books ... comparable in ultimate importance to ... Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill", Cybernetics was judged by twenty-seven historians, economists, educators, and philosophers to be one of those books published during the "past four decades," which may have a substantial impact on public thought and action in the years ahead."--Saturday Review.

An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise

John Robinson Pierce · 305 pages

A Little History of Science

William F. Bynum · 272 pages

Science is wonderful. It tells us about the infinite reaches of space, the tiniest living organism, the human body and the history of our planet. Science has always been about making sense of the world and harnessing its power. From ancient Greek philosophers through Einstein and Watson and Crick to the computer-assisted scientists of today, men and women have wondered, examined, experimented, cal

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

Clive Thompson

" It's undeniable-technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding "yes." The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and analysis. We learn more and retain it longer, write and think with global audiences, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world arou