Isbn: 0702212725
Sales Rank: 2725849

Isbn: 0030723906
Sales Rank: 3105155

Isbn: 0750013885
Subjects:  1. Mechanical engineering    2. Philosophy / history of ideas    3. Social history   

Reviews (44)

Fascinating Tale of Discovery & Use of the Compass
The "Riddle" is well researched and written in a down to earth, flowing, enjoyable, fascinating and educational journey of discovery. Good illustrations help clarify text descriptions. To emphasize the *importance of the compass to navigation*, there is a quote from an English Augustinian monk, Alexander Neckam (1157-1217) from his book, `De Naturis Rerun':

"The sailors, moreover, as they sail over the sea, when in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the sun, or when the world is wrapped in the darkness of the shades of night, and they are ignorant to what point of the compass their ship's course is directed, they touch the magnet with a needle. This then whirls round in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point looks direct to the north." (p 30-31)

Aczel opens the story of the "Riddle" by first relating his childhood memories of growing up on a passenger ship in the Mediterranean where learned how to navigate from his father, the ship's captain. "As the years went by, I developed a feel for the compass and the wheel" (p 2)

This gives him a unique perspective in tracing the origins of the compass and the discovery of magnetism and it's application to the navigational compass. So years later, when he set sail on the journeyto find the origins of the compass, he was first directed to Amalfi, Italy where the first European invention of the compass was supposedly credited to a man named Flavio Gioia in 1302. Although the city of Amalfi boasts ofthe discovery of the compass with statues and the like, it doesn't take long to find serious flaws in this legend and the unfolding of that story makes for a fascinating tale in itself.

The true history of magnetism and the compass is presented in a fascinating overview that also includes the historical use of the stars, reading of ocean currents, weather and migrating birds that helped early mariners in navigation over the centuries.

The Chinese are credited by most historians as being the discoverors of magnetism and this possibly as far back as 1000 BC. They found that magnetic lodestone had an effect on metal and when a piece of spoon-shaped metal was magnetised by it and then placed in water, it always pointed South. Initially, thisdiscovery was used for divination and land coordinates, but eventuallywas adapted to sailing for navigation.

From the ancient Chinese, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Europeans to the modern times, the story of the compass and so much more is thoroughly covered. This is an excellent read!

As a companion to Aczel's fine book and for more compass info,I also recommend "The Compass" by Paula Z. Hogan, 1980. Although written for children, it is informative and suitable for all ages and backgrounds and in 60 pages, packs more compass facts than any other book I have seen.

Interesting but Left Some Explanations Open
The topic was certainly interesting, but the device is so simple that it's a little difficult to go much deeper than the author did. He certainly cites enough documents, but, not too unexpectedly, they seem to talk to human events rather than of anything technical. It's good to know about how the sixteen points came about, but he offered no explanation about what I consider the somewhat bizarre naming of the points. Maybe I'm missing something, but is the scheme for name ordering the points between, say, N and E, the same as from, say, E to S?

The section of Flavio Gioia left me almost as confused about the supposed inventor of the 'modern' (1302?!!) compass as the Italians who erected a statue in 1902 to this apparently fictional character. The name Gioia appears from nowhere.

I would like to have more detail about how early navigators actually did some of their navigation, but what he did supply was still interesting. Not too long ago I was in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and saw some interesting devices the Scandinavians used. Unfortunately,a huge crowd of students made it difficult to really figure out and even see what the exhibit had to offer. It would have been good to see the detail offered there expressed in such a book as this.

I found a section near the very end of the book a little puzzling. He talks about how the Chinese were very secretive about their discoveries, and mentions they had a cure for malaria for some two centuries. Only recently has it become known to the West. It's based on a herb that's not only found in China but in N. America. He never mentions what it is! This is somehow how I felt about the book. It seemed to leave the door open for other answers to items discussed in the book.

Reviews (1)

Reviews (9)

The Renaissance man of Renaissance men at work
Leonardo's curiosity and inventiveness are on display throughout this work. I cannot judge the quality of the translation , or how good the Richter edition of the Notebooks is. I can say that this is a tremendous amount of interesting observation and thought regarding the subjects from anatomy to perspective in painting, questions of architecture and aeronautics, that concern the Renaissance Man of Renaissance Men. All of this is in a way too much for another mind certainly one like my own who simply does not know anything about many of the areas Leonardo was interested in to real take in. But I think every person who takes an interest in the human mind and the way it works, in creativity and genius would do well to have and read these works.

ok, worth it cuz its cheap
This book is worth the money 'cuz its so cheap. The reproducions arent really that good, and there are some problems of provenance: the cover drawing attributed to Leonardo, but it is by his master/teacher Verrocchio.

Reviews (9)

The Renaissance man of Renaissance men at work
Leonardo's curiosity and inventiveness are on display throughout this work. I cannot judge the quality of the translation , or how good the Richter edition of the Notebooks is. I can say that this is a tremendous amount of interesting observation and thought regarding the subjects from anatomy to perspective in painting, questions of architecture and aeronautics, that concern the Renaissance Man of Renaissance Men. All of this is in a way too much for another mind certainly one like my own who simply does not know anything about many of the areas Leonardo was interested in to real take in. But I think every person who takes an interest in the human mind and the way it works, in creativity and genius would do well to have and read these works.

ok, worth it cuz its cheap
This book is worth the money 'cuz its so cheap. The reproducions arent really that good, and there are some problems of provenance: the cover drawing attributed to Leonardo, but it is by his master/teacher Verrocchio.

Reviews (2)

Seminal work by leading Gutenberg scholar
Kapr's book is the result of his life's research on Gutenberg and a summary of all that was known on the subject by the late 20th century. Some readers might find the book slightly dry and scholarly, but it gives all the familiar and obscure, bizarre and quirky tales about the inventor of printing, and it patiently distinguishes which parts of the legend are speculative and apocryphal from those that deserve to be considered historical fact. Kapr's narrative paints a vivid picture of fifteenth-century southwestern Germany, its social structure and politics and the conditions that set the stage for Gutenberg's achievment. We see Gutenberg's childhood as the son of a wealthy businessman and wine producer and how this could have given him the ideas he later put into practice in his inventions. One of the more interesting and illustrative stories is Gutenberg's invention of metal stamping to manufacture mirrors for the pilgrims at Aachen, a brilliant piece of imaginative work that was blunted by his miscalculation by a year of the date of the Aachen pilgrimmage. Throughout the book we see repeated instances of Gutenberg's restless inventive powers and his benighted (or astonishingly unlucky) career as a businessperson. In the end, Kapr shows how Gutenberg fell afoul of the Pope and was driven out of his home town by the Pope's allies and left to die in obscurity. In addition, the book shows to a small degree the contribution of Peter Schoeffer to the invention and explains why the world's first printing firm was Fust und Schoeffer rather than Gutenberg und Gesellschaft. As a reader with a personal interest in printing and typography and an amateur historian's thirst for more fine details to round out my knowledge of the early Renaissance, I found this book to be unputdownable.

Reviews (2)

Invents a cardboard Newton to fit Fundamentalist needs.
This book serves up a bowdlerized version of Sir Isaac Newton that has been carefully crafted to make him look like a modern Evangelical Fundamentalist.It makes good Sunday-school reading, perhaps, but itdoesn't make for accurate biography.

Sir Isaac Newton was indeed acommitted Christian and an almost obsessed Biblical scholar, as well as atowering mathematical genius.However, his years of scholarship ultimatelyled him to reject the doctrine of the Trinity and adopt a system ofChristian belief that was closer to Arianism than to orthodox Christianity. See the essays collected in John Fauvel's <>for more information on this view of Newton and the evidence for it in hispersonal notebooks.See also Dr. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs' careful study<> to understand how important the thirty years Newton spentinvestigating the claims of alchemy were in the development of his maturescientific philosophy.

Reviews (1)

Isbn: 0827322429
Sales Rank: 2267718
Subjects:  1. Engineering - Automotive    2. Engineering - Mechanical    3. Gas and oil engines    4. Internal Combustion Engines    5. Internal combustion engines, S    6. Internal combustion engines, Spark ignition    7. Technology & Industrial Arts   

Reviews (2)

Eli Whitney
Excellent book! The author presents the life of Eli Whitney from birth to death, and all his accomplishments. I found that Eli was more gifted than previously thought and accomplished much more than is covered in simple biographies.

She shows how Eli was mechanical from a young age, and how through perseverence in the many tribulations he faced, he finally reached the success he desired.

The author used the letters and papers from Eli's life to write the biography and inserts their text throughout the biography.

Isbn: 0801858194
Sales Rank: 1129169
Subjects:  1. General    2. History    3. History Of Technology    4. Inventions    5. Science    6. Science/Mathematics    7. Science / History   

Isbn: 0810940051
Sales Rank: 649335
Subjects:  1. 1847-1922    2. Bell, Alexander Graham,    3. Biography    4. Biography / Autobiography    5. Historical - U.S.    6. History    7. Inventions    8. Inventors    9. Science/Mathematics    10. Scientists - General    11. Technology    12. Telecommunications    13. Telephone    14. Telephone Engineering    15. United States    16. Bell, Alexander Graham    17. Bargain   

Isbn: 0316569046
Sales Rank: 1546770
Subjects:  1. Criminal provisions    2. Industrial hygiene    3. Industrial safety    4. Law and legislation    5. United States   

Isbn: 1584151145
Sales Rank: 1037582
Subjects:  1. 1845-1923    2. Biography    3. Biography & Autobiography - Science & Technology    4. Children's 9-12 - Biography / Autobiography    5. Children: Grades 4-6    6. Germany    7. Juvenile Nonfiction    8. Juvenile Social Problems (General)    9. Juvenile literature    10. Physicists    11. Rontgen, Wilhelm Conrad,    12. Science & Technology - Inventions & Discoveries    13. Science & Technology - Physics    14. X-rays   

Editorial Review

Reviews (9)

Autobiography, easy to read
You can read this book in a weekend and it's very interesting.
It's his autobiography, his inventions.
It's available free on the internet in pdf.
You should buy "A man out of Time" instead.

Tesla better at inventing than writing
Mr. Tesla should have let someone else write his biography. Granted he was at his peak in the early 1900's, but much of the information he gives out about his life, especially his childhood years, is truly unbelievable - not in a good way.

Reviews (21)

The Wright Brothers and their peers, described in depth
The Wright Brothers did not achieve their historic accomplishments in a vacuum, without the advice and support of other pioneers in the quest for human flight.I suppose that this should be common knowledge, but I was unaware of the contributions of Samuel Langley and others to the study of flight before reading James Tobin's remarkable book.Before his in-depth description of the Wright Brothers work that led to the first manned flight, Tobin describes in some detail Langley's investigations into flight, including one ill-fated attempt at a manned flight that would have beaten the Wrights by just several days.Tobin goes on to describe the race for accomplishments in the area of human flight, noting such worthy competitors as Alexander Graham Bell and Glenn Hammond Curtiss.Tobin's book is thus both a touching tribute to the Wright Brothers, as well as a spirited salute to their friends and competitors (some of whom were the same people).Details such as the power struggle within their church may seem irrelevant to some, but to me they provided a richness to Tobin's book that is no doubt missing from many other works on the Wright Brothers. An excellent book, one of the rare works I plan on reading again at some point.

Forgotten aspects of the race for flight well presented
This could have been a tangled & complicated story, or it could have been a one-dimensional story of the Wright Brothers and nobody else.Fortunately, Tobin has the skills as a researcher & writer to sustain about half a dozen different story lines without having the whole structure collapse.I am not sure which was harder --- keeping this book coherent or perfecting the art of flight.

What was most interesting for me were how different the incentives were for the various compeitors.For some the incentive was the pure pursuit of science (the Wrights & Alexander Bell), for some the incentive was securing a place in history (S.P. Langley & Octave Chanute), and for some it was the quest for profit & commercial success, plain & simple (Glen Hammond).

Just the motives were extremely varied, so too were the approaches to solving the challenge of flight.Langley assumed that the biggest part of the puzzle was power; build an engine strong enough and the other details would just work themselves out.If Langley had had a jet engine available, he might have gotten away with it --- although I wouldn't want to be flying in any plane developed along those lines.The Wrights on the other hand, saw the challenge of lift to be the key to the puzzle --- build a device that could achieve near-vertical lift and you could probably manage without a super-powerful engine.

One comes away from this book with an enhanced respect for the natural scientific brilliance of the Wrights.So few of us actually have any knowledge of the systematic approach the Wrights took in solving the problem of lift in their little wind tunnel.Never ones to get ahead of themselves, the Wrights made sure they had explored every wing configuration they could think of before moving to the next stage of development.

Tobin could have ended the story with the Wright's first flight, but he is too good of a historian not to look at the larger picture.As soon as one battle was won, other battles needed to be fought.It is open to debate as to who ultimately won this war, depending on what your perspective was.

This was a great book.Tobin makes aerodynamics pretty understandable to almost anyone, and he has a great narrative skill.You will be left with a much greater respect for what a magnificent scientific feat achieving flight was --- after all, almost everyone else ultimately failed.

"A New Kind of Gull in New York Harbor"
As the title of the book states, James Tobin offers a study of the progression of the airplane not just as a Wright brothers biography but as an examination of the efforts of many scientists and inventors in the "race for flight."As Tobin follows the years of research and test flights of the Wilbur and Orville Wright, he also switches to the works of Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley and Charles Manly, Octave Chanute, Alexander Graham Bell and his crew of young, ambitious visionaries which included the Wrights' chief rival Glenn Curtiss, and inventors who made their fame in France where lighter-than-air fliers were king.Tobin demonstrates through articles and correspondences how these experimenters influenced and motivated each other in their steps toward the creation of a practical flying machine.

Although this book is not a biographical study per se, Tobin does offer a lot of information on the personalities of the Wrights.Tobin examines the many letters between the brothers, their father, and sister Kate to give the reader some sense of what these quiet, mysterious inventors working in a bicycle shop were like.Tobin also gives the reader some historical context for the times; for example, the popularity of bicycles at the turn of the century during which the Wrights had their own cycle company (pg. 45), or the importance of the photos in McClure's magazine of Otto Lilienthal gliding in his makeshift monoplane in 1894 two years before he met a tragic fate in another experimental flight (pg. 49) (photographs of things in motion being relatively new at the time).

The details in this book demonstrates exhaustive research.One learns, for example, that the brothers had two buzzers in their cycle shop so that, if the second buzzer rang, they knew the customer came in just to air up his tires and they could remain upstairs conducting their many wind tunnel experiments.Of course, Tobin describes each stay at Kitty Hawk where the brothers tried their machines, Wilbur's demonstrations in France, Orville's demonstrations at Fort Myer (where the brother was injured and one of Bell's young crew members was killed), and Wilbur's sensational circling of the Statue of Liberty.I agree with another reviewer that the famous first flight on December 17, 1903 is not emphasized.I did not realize I was reading about it when I got to it.It is buried among all the many test glides of the Wrights and the frustrations of Langley.But there are many books that cover this topic thoroughly.Tobin is looking at the larger picture in this book.

Reviews (8)

Great story, but misses a few important relevancies
I loved this book, the story of yet another unsung hero, the lone wolf pioneer, oblivious to the world's thieves, fighting to realize a dream, then getting ripped off for it at the moment of success. Ask yourself: who invented the lightbulb, the telephone, the radio, the airplane? You know the answer. (It might not actually be fully correct, but you can certainly come up with an appropriate name.) Now, who invented television? That is, the means of converting a moving image into a stream of electrons. Stumped? Some people know the names of Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth, but not many. This book is the extremely fascinating story of Philo T. Farnsworth (what a name!) and how one man, David Sarnoff, succeeded in placing in the mind of the public the idea that television was created by him, as the leader of RCA/NBC. Zworykin worked for Sarnoff, and between the two totally ripped off the ideas and even the patents behind the creation of TV. While Farnsworth did receive a minimal amount of credit and some money during his life, in the end his name was buried as far as the public was concerned.

Unfortunately, the author seems oblivious to the fact of similar rip-offs occurring right amongst some of the minor characters of the story, in particular Edison AND Marconi stealing, and trying to keep Tesla from receiving, the credit he deserved for lighting and radio discoveries. Everyone has their own axe to grind, but the fact is if you dig deep enough, there are probably stories like this surrounding every great technological advance.

Anyway, if you at all like the genre, this book is bound to become a classic for you. It's also a great cautionary tale regarding the weaknesses of the patent system as practiced in the USA.

An engaging, quick, entertaining read
More party conversation facts that you can expect to collect from 99/100 other books. A great story, well told. Professionally and rigorously researched. Fun to read.

Quick read, and honest about the prospects of invention
Evan Schwartz has done an excellent job in creating a fast read without the depth of A Beautiful Mind, but interesting nonetheless. His subject is after all a more straightforward individual than John Nash, although Schwartz, like Sylvia Nasar, does explore some of the darker corners of Farnsworth's personality.

Schwartz refreshingly does not engage in positivistic technological whoop-de-doo about the possibility of reviving the status of the lone inventor. During the dot.com boom there was some loose talk about the possibility of the better mousetrap but it is clear that the administered world, that Farnsworth's nemesis in the book (David Sarnoff of RCA) helped to install in the 1920s, makes technological innovation, by the lone inventor, the exception and not the rule.

Schwartz also does an excellent job of balancing the two very different (yet strangely alike) personalities of Philo T. Farnsworth versus "General" Sarnoff, who more or less browbeat Dwight Eisenhower into making him a General for Sarnoff's admirable war record.

For Philo T. Farnsworth belonged more to the 1890s than the administered, corporate world of the 1920s. His name is somewhat odd in that (like Edward G. Nilges) it confesses an unbroken attachment to a family-of-origin, and a need to at one and the same time identify with a clan, yet precisely identify oneself as an individual within the clan.

Sarnoff's name is cooler-sounding and more down-to-business to the modern and indeed the administered ear, and far more than old Philo, Sarnoff was "skilled" (if that is indeed the word) in manipulating, not technical and scientific realities but his relations with his fellow men.

Farnsworth was of course no slouch in the PR department, but Sarnoff was more aware that the effect of illusion could be self-reinforcing, and that Sarnoff could USE the technology (and let others tinker with the technology), as in Schwartz' example of Sarnoff's dog and pony show at the 1939 World's Fair.

Technicians may cry foul, but the unavoidable fact that one technology builds upon another MEANS that the administered world (in Farnsworth's time, of cheap radio buff magazines, in ours, of cheap personal computers) was brought into being by social engineers *malgre lui* like Sarnoff.

But one cannot give old-fashioned credit to the Sarnoffs and the Gates when one admits this fact, and the reason for this is the inseperability of the social illusion they created, and the feeling the rest of us that we have been subtly horn-swoggled.

At the 1939 World's Fair, young David Gerlenter was very impressed by what in fact had little relationship to reality but the illusion created by the Fair urged him not only to participate in the creation of the world of "tomorrow", it also made them enthusiastically not question its ideological presumptions.

Missing, of necessity, in Evan Schwartz' quick read is another (indirect) employee of David Sarnoff, and this is my cherubic but rather gloomy old pal Theodore Adorno.

[The frequency of mention of Adorno may indicate to the unwashed a stalker-like obsession although Adorno died in 1970, or it may indicate that I am on to something Big.]

Adorno was indirectly retained at the Princeton Radio Research project in the 1930s by an RCA funded group that was charged, by Sarnoff, with making radio more high-class, and Schwartz describes Sarnoff's own tastes, which were in the lingo of the day, high-brow.

Walter Damrosch, not "Damrouch" as it is in the book, was a popular classical conductor of the 1930s and performed, as Schwartz recounts, at an RCA celebration. Sarnoff hoped that Adorno, et al., would show him how to market, over radio and possibly television, "quality" programming.

Being an intellectual cousin of Farnsworth in the very different but in fact equally demanding field of sociology, Adorno seems to have disruptively wanted to first theorize the impact of Edison's, Marconi's, and Farnsworth's creations on the listener.Adorno, in a truly pragmatic spirit, wanted to take the material basis into account, but was forestalled from doing so.

Adorno was aware, ten years before the appearance of McLuhan, that the medium, in particular its necessary limitations, might become the message. He theorized that the limitations might be necessary using, not the Aristotelean or Boolean logic familiar to a Farnsworth, but a 'dialectic' call and response logic in which we might actually demand, in the case of music reproduction, the very experience that denies, excludes, an older, and possibly richer, experience.

Of course, the engineer then and now is engaged in finding ways to satisfy demands, and not prove their mutual exclusion, which is why theoretical sociologists are scorned by engineers. But Boolean logic's possibility happens to rest on the bare possibility of knowledge, and one of Farnsworth's limitations was that this blinded him to the importance of PR over and above valid patents.