Showing titles in History

Bloomsbury presents Electronic Dreams by Tom Lean, read by Mark Meadows Remember the ZX Spectrum? How about the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, or Commodore 64? Did you marvel at the immense galaxies of Elite or master digital kung-fu in Way of the Exploding Fist? For anyone growing up in the 1980s...

In Nuts and Bolts, award-winning engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. Each of these objects is itself a wonder of design, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build the spectacular, communicate across vast distances, and even escape our planet.

From a world-leading AI researcher, the history of artificial intelligence told through the six key ways it functions Since Alan Turing first posed the question "Can machines think?" artificial intelligence has evolved from a speculative idea to a transformative force. The Shortest History of AI...

The definitive and “captivating” (Marty Baron, author of Collision of Power) story of San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. At the dawn of the...

From the city sundials of ancient Rome to the era of the smartwatch, clocks have been used throughout history to wield power, make money, govern citizens and keep control. Sometimes, also with clocks, we have fought back. In About Time, time expert David Rooney tells the story of timekeeping, and how it continues to shape our modern world. In 12 chapters, demarcated like the hours of time, we meet the greatest inventions in horological history, from medieval water clocks to monumental sundials, and from coastal time signals to satellites in Earth's orbit. 

In the 1970s, while their contemporaries were protesting the computer as a tool of dehumanization and oppression, a motley collection of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics fanatics were engaged in something much more subversive. Obsessed with the idea of getting computer power into their own hands, they launched from their garages a hobbyist movement that grew into an industry, and ultimately a social and technological revolution.

Bloomsbury presents Breaking the Chains of Gravity written and read by Amy Shira Teitel. The incredible story of spaceflight before the establishment of NASA. NASA’s history is a familiar story, one that typically peaks with Neil Armstrong taking his small step on the Moon in 1969. But...

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI.

On October 4, 1957, a time of Cold War paranoia, the Soviet Union secretly launched the Earth's first artificial moon. No bigger than a basketball, the tiny satellite was powered by a car battery. Yet, for all its simplicity, Sputnik stunned the world.

 Block by Block offers an original perspective on thermodynamic science and history based on the three approaches of a practicing engineer, academician, and historian. The book synthesizes and gathers into one accessible volume a strategic range of foundational topics involving the atomic theory, energy, entropy, and the laws of thermodynamics. 

Yorkshire is 'a continent unto itself', a region where mountain, plain, coast, downs, fen and heath lie close. By weaving history, family stories, travelogue and ecology, Richard Morris reveals how Yorkshire took shape as a landscape and in literature, legend and popular regard. The result is a...

Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be. Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there.  

Communication has always been at the heart of human progress. From smoke signals on mountaintops to the invisible Wi-Fi networks that surround us today, every leap forward has reshaped how we share ideas, stay safe, build relationships, and understand the world. From Morse Code to Wi-Fi is a clear, captivating journey through the ten biggest breakthroughs that transformed human connection forever.

An illustrated history of American innovators—some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating—by the author of the bestselling The American Century. The real inventor of the steam engine. The creator of the bra. The man who invented modern banking. The creator of the computer operating...

How do we spark new scientific discoveries? How can we accelerate new breakthroughs in science? These are some of the biggest unsolved questions in science. Many believe that discoveries arise by chance or serendipity. The Engine of Scientific Discovery illustrates, for the first time, how we...

Most people think about technology as something we created to serve us, but we may well be getting to the point where we are the ones who're serving an ever more sophisticated technology. With pragmatism and optimism, Dr Tim Sharp, aka Dr Happy, outlines strategies and tools to build your confidence to positively cope with the modern world.

This book will make you chuckle, gasp, and maybe even double-check your phone settings. From bizarre inventions to behind-the-scenes (or screens!) trivia, you’ll uncover things you didn’t even know were a thing about the tiny tech that rules your life.

In 2019, a Chinese entity called Tencent overtook Facebook to become the world's fifth-largest company. It was a watershed moment, a wake-up call for those in the West accustomed to regarding the global tech industry through the prism of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Yet to many of the two billion-plus people who live just across the Pacific Ocean, it came as no surprise at all.

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street Journal From the Palantir co-founder, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of...

Worm: The First Digital World War tells the story of the Conficker worm, a potentially devastating piece of malware that has baffled experts and infected more than twelve million computers worldwide. When Conficker was unleashed in November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it. Exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows, it grew at an astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the world within weeks.