Skip to main content

The Electronics Revolution - J. B. Williams ***

If I'm honest, The Electronics Revolution was a lot better than I thought it would be. it has 27 topic-based chapters plus intro and conclusion, covering the development of electronic technology - some of it where electronics was not always involved - in everything from radio and TV to recorded music and computing. There is a real danger with this kind of format that you end up with chapter after chapter with very little substance, simply recounting examples of a particular application. Just occasionally, there is a touch of this - for example in dealing with the Millennium bug. However, mostly what we get is much better.

 What is impressive about the way that J. B. Williams (we are told nothing concerning the author, not even a first name) covers these topics is the detail of the early history that he or she digs out. So, for example, I thought I knew a fair amount about the origins of thermionic valves/vacuum tubes, but I hadn't seen before the story of Edison accidentally inventing the diode but not realising what he had done.

 This kind of 'ooh, that's interesting' bit happens regularly, particularly in the early parts of the history of each technology. Whether it's Berliner developing the gramophone or the various contributors to the development of integrated circuits, Williams fills in snippets of detail that you don't often see. The book was also particularly interesting with a transatlantic viewpoint, as he/she frequently produces plots of the take-up of various technologies comparing the UK and the US - while in some cases the US has the obvious lead, in others it lagged significantly behind, often due to entrenched business interests.

 The book is copyrighted 2017, but I do wonder if the text was written a few years earlier, as some later developments are missing. The section on video recording, for example, ends with DVDs and Blu-ray without mentioning PVRs... or for that matter, the way streaming has made recording far less necessary (this is also the case in the recorded music section).

 The author's personality comes through occasionally in chapters that touch on societal impacts. What we get is a slightly old-fashioned and sceptical view. Perhaps the oddest of these chapters is one on 'Pop music: youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s' which feels as if it's written by someone who was already past their youth by that time. But the strongest feeling comes through at the end of the banking chapter (one of the examples where the US has lagged way behind). On internet banking we are told 'Some younger people took to this with enthusiasm but the growth of internet banking was slow.' Hardly the picture now. Almost all electronic contributions to banking are described as if they purely benefit the banks and aren't useful to the customers, being a sort of conspiracy to distance the consumer from actual money so they would borrow more. Once again, this section feels like it was written a while ago - there's no mention of contactless payments or pay-by-phone.

 All in all, I felt I got a lot from this book, despite the author's foibles. I don't think it quite makes it as a general interest book, hence the 3 star rating, but if, like me, you have an interest in the early history of electronic technology, it's well worth getting hold of a copy.

Paperback:  

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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more