Transforming the Twentieth Century

The second half of Smil’s pair on the technical history of the last century. Creating the Twentieth Century (2005, and also on Li Lu’s list) covers 1867–1914, the generation that invented electricity generation, the internal combustion engine, synthetic ammonia and the chemical industry. This volume takes those inventions forward and measures what they became: grids, mass electrification, aviation, materials, electronics and information, and above all the increases in energy use and food production that let the human population quadruple. Smil’s method is quantitative throughout — efficiencies, power densities, tonnages — and his consistent point is that the twentieth century’s transformation was not a sequence of discoveries but the slow diffusion and scaling of a small number of them.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s first section, on Science, Philosophy, Evolution, and the History of Human Civilization, treats material and technical history as a prerequisite rather than a specialism. Smil is how that section grounds itself in numbers: the argument is that you cannot reason about civilizational change without knowing what the energy and materials actually did.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 20 of the first section, cited as the 2006 Oxford University Press edition — its first publication. The list carries the companion volume, Creating the Twentieth Century, as entry 19. Kyle saved the list as two X posts that photographed only its value-investing section; the full list was recovered from the source PDF.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the bibliography this came from.
• Vaclav Smil — author; Growth (Vaclav Smil) is the other Smil title already in the anti-library.
• Technological Innovation · Energy · Industrial Revolution — the subject matter.