Skip to main content

The Most Powerful Idea in the World – William Rosen ****

Histories of the industrial revolution are ten-a-penny, and often rather dull. What William Rosen neatly does with his book, subtitled ‘a story of steam, industry and invention’ is manage to make this hugely important topic – this is, after all, the story of the formation of the modern world – fresh and interesting.
I don’t know if it’s because the author is American that the book seemed particularly fresh – having that slight distance from a story that is mostly about Britain gives it an edge, and his inclusion of US context, which might well be missing from a UK version of this story, was valuable.
Of course we’ve got all the familiar characters here – Watt, Arkwright , Trevithick, Stephenson and the rest – but there is so much more. Rosen takes us on a journey (with plenty of side excursions) through the entire development of industrialization and leading to the crowning moment of the Rocket’s performance at the Rainhill Trials. What helps keep it interesting is the way that Rosen mixes details about the technology, the people and the nature of invention and innovation – so you’ll find lots of information on patent law (more interesting than it sounds) alongside the steam valves and thermodynamics. It really makes you think about the approach that should be taken to intellectual property.
Two of my grandparents worked in a cotton mill in Lancashire that was a direct descendent of the mills that are central to Rosen’s story, so I found this particularly interesting on a personal level, but you don’t have to have that connection to feel the importance of this story. It is about the transformation of a rural economy into an industrial one for the first time in history – a transformation that would be followed by the rest of the world. Just occasionally Rosen can be a little flowery in his language, or a little nerdy in his enthusiasm for some aspect of steam engine technology – but this is rare, and can be overlooked because of the quality of the book as a whole.
One of the things that makes this book so enjoyable is the detail of the research – the author clearly really likes diving into obscure detail, then bringing it out in a way that intrigues. I wish he hadn’t used footnotes – all the footnotes are worth reading, and would work much better as part of the main text – but that’s a small concern. I’m assuming that the research was thorough. There is one glaring error, but I’m guessing it’s just a slip where he relied on memory and it let him down (I’m always doing this in my books). He attributes the put-down ‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting,’ to Kelvin, where it was actually Rutherford who made this cutting remark.
All in all, though, an excellent book about an era that should be essential knowledge for all of us in the modern world.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more