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It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and — ironically — less innovative. Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster.

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.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

Homesteading Space is more than a story of technological and scientific success; it is also an absorbing, sometimes humorous, often inspiring account of the determined, hardworking individuals who shepherded the program through a near-disastrous launch, a heroic rescue, an exhausting study of Comet Kohoutek, and the lab's descent into the Indian Ocean. Featuring the unpublished in-flight diary of astronaut Alan Bean, it is replete with the personal recollections and experiences of the Skylab crew and those who worked with them in training, during the mission, and the return.

The Tunnel Under the Lake recounts the gripping story of how the young city of Chicago, under the leadership of an audacious engineer named Ellis Chesbrough, constructed a two-mile tunnel below Lake Michigan in search of clean water. Benjamin Sells narrates in vivid detail the exceptional skill and imagination it took to save this storied city from itself. 

Medieval Robots recovers the forgotten history of fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines that captivated Europe in imagination and reality between the ninth and 14th centuries. E. R. Truitt traces the different forms of self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects from their earliest appearances in the Latin West through centuries of mechanical and literary invention. This original and wide-ranging study reveals the convergence of science, technology, and imagination in medieval culture.

Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation chronicles the humble origin and meteoric business success of this extraordinary entrepreneur. Author Bill Double uses published interviews, correspondence, newspaper reports, magazine articles, financial data, and a small family archive to tell this story of native ingenuity. Here, the rough-hewn capitalism of the gilded age, the evolution of the neighborhood drugstore, the rise of advertising in creating mass markets, and the emerging temperance movement all come together in a biography that fizzes with entrepreneurial spirit.

Brilliant offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history - from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. Jane Brox plumbs the class implications of light - who had it, who didn't - through the many centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. Brillant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and - only a few years before it becomes illegal to sell most incandescent light bulbs in the United States - timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light.

In 1940, with German U-boats blockading all commerce across the Atlantic Ocean, a fireball at the Crown Cork and Seal factory lit the sky over Baltimore. The newspapers said you could see its glow as far north as Philadelphia and as far south as Annapolis. Rumors of Nazi sabotage led to an FBI investigation and pulled an entire industry into the machinery of national security as America stood on the brink of war. David Taylor traces this fascinating story through the lives of three men and their families, who were all drawn into this dangerous intersection of enterprise and espionage.

Behind every great revolution is a vision, and behind perhaps the greatest revolution of our time, personal computing, is the vision of J.C.R. Licklider. In a simultaneously compelling personal narrative and comprehensive historical exposition, Waldrop tells the story of the man who not only instigated the work that led to the internet, but also shifted our understanding of what computers were and could be.

The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), designed to quickly deliver thermonuclear weapons to distant targets, was the central weapons system of the Cold War. ICBMs also carried the first astronauts and cosmonauts into orbit. More than a generation later, we are still living with the political, technological, and scientific effects of the space race, while nuclear-armed ICBMs remain on alert and in the headlines around the world. Christopher Gainor explores the US Air Force's decision, in March 1954, to build the Atlas, America's first ICBM. 

In recent decades, most innovation has come from a single sector (information technology) and a single place (Silicon Valley). Walter Isaacson's The Innovators and Peter Thiel's Zero to One shed light on how that happened and what drives innovation more generally.

As Marc Raboy shows us in this enthralling and comprehensive biography, Marconi was the first truly global figure in modern communications. Born to an Italian father and an Irish mother, he was in many ways stateless, working his cosmopolitanism to advantage. Through a combination of skill, tenacity, luck, vision, and timing, Marconi popularized - and, more critically, patented - the use of radio waves.

Alan Turing can be regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. But who was Turing, and what did he achieve during his tragically short life of 41 years? Best known as the genius who broke Germany's most secret codes during the war of 1939-45, Turing was also the father of the modern computer. Today, all who 'click-to-open' are familiar with the impact of Turing's ideas. Here, B. Jack Copeland provides an account of Turing's life and work, exploring the key elements of his life-story in tandem with his leading ideas and contributions.

The US Army entered World War II unprepared. Lacking Germany's blitzkrieg approach of coordinated armor and air power, the army was organized to fight two wars: one on the ground and one in the air. Previous commentators have blamed Congressional funding and public apathy for the army's unprepared state. David E. Johnson believes instead that the principal causes were internal: army culture and bureaucracy, and their combined impact on the development of weapons and doctrine.

Although we usually think of technology as something unique to modern times, our ancestors began to create the first technologies millions of years ago in the form of prehistoric tools and weapons. Over time, eight key technologies gradually freed us from the limitations of our animal origins.

Once we step on the treadmill of progress, it's hard to step off. Yet Edward Tenner shows that human ingenuity can be applied in self-preservation as well, and he sheds light on the ways in which the users of commonplace technology surprise designers and engineers, as when early typists developed the touch method still employed on today's keyboards. And he offers concrete advice for reaping benefits from the devices that we no longer seem able to live without. Although dependent on these objects, we can also use them to liberate ourselves.

Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary "harmonic telegraph", by the middle of the 20th century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.

For fans of The Astronaut Wives Club, The Mercury 13 reveals the little-known true story of the remarkable women who trained for NASA space flight. In 1961, just as NASA launched its first man into space, a group of women underwent secret testing in the hopes of becoming America’s first female astronauts. They passed the same battery of tests at the legendary Lovelace Foundation as did the Mercury 7 astronauts, but they were summarily dismissed by the boys’ club at NASA and on Capitol Hill.

In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress.