Transforming the Twentieth Century — Technical Innovations and Their Consequences
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Transforming the Twentieth Century — Technical Innovations and Their Consequences
| Full title | Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences |
|---|---|
| Author | Vaclav Smil |
| Published | 2006 |
| Pages | 358 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Vaclav Smil takes the inventions of 1867–1914 forward and measures what they became — grids, mass electrification, aviation, materials, electronics, and the gains in energy use and food production that let the human population quadruple. Quantitative throughout, its 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. |
Transforming the Twentieth Century
Where I heard about it
- Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 20 of the first section (Science, Philosophy, Evolution, and the History of Human Civilization), which treats material and technical history as a prerequisite rather than a specialism. The companion volume, Creating the Twentieth Century, is entry 19.
About this edition
The second half of Smil’s pair on the technical history of the last century; Creating the Twentieth Century (2005) covers the generation that invented electricity generation, the internal combustion engine, synthetic ammonia and the chemical industry. First published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
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.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.