Hasta La Ideas

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pA gentleman named Charles Fredrick Wiesenthal was the first to realize that putting the eye in the middle of the needle could aid in rapid mechanistic stitching in 1775. Later, Elias Howe perfected the lockstitch sewing machine, but it was Isaac Merritt Singer who would ultimately become synonymous with the sewing machine, even though he never had that critical flash of insight. Instead, he was able to minimize costs and bring a product that represented a confluence of technological ideas to market at precisely the right time. While the invention of the sewing machine was a special case where many of the original inventors were able to pool their patents and share in the proceeds, the story of most inventions is much more one-sided. Black Dog Publishing’s a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Inventors-Inventions-Black-Dog-Publishing/dp/1906155674/?tag=core77-20″emInventors and Inventions/em/a, edited by Duncan McCorquodale, amply illustrates this occasionally tragic trend. Organized into broad categories ranging from Communication to Warfare, emInventors/em groups product photos, patent figures and inventor photos (well, after Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre’s invention of photography in 1839) with historical overviews for everything from Air Conditioning to the Yo-Yo./p

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pAfter an introduction by Richard Fisher that uses the evolution of the Lithium Ion battery as a proxy for the progress of invention in general, the book moves into lists of inventions by category. Strangely, Core77 could not determine by what criteria the lists were ordered. Since in general, the editors tried to ascribe a date to each inventions, chronological would have been a reasonable choice, but the pencil precedes the quill. Another likely method would have been in order of importance, but the Guttenberg Press (widely mentioned as a world-changing, world-shrinking invention) follows the ballpoint pen, which rules out descending order, and the light bulb precedes the pressure cooker, which pretty much rules out ascending order. Instead, it seems that the products were given categorical groupings, so that Viagra, contraception and In Vitro Fertilization are all clustered within a few pages. For the reader, however, this makes for an occasionally choppy journey jumping from the Air Conditioner (1906) to Soap (2800 BC by their estimation). Although the context of the book as a whole is occasionally confusing, the individual product descriptions provide accurate and occasionally surprising overviews for ideas that we take for granted (life before animal husbandry is nearly impossible to conceive), and products that boggle the mind as we conceive their true scope (the microwave oven uses radio waves to excite the activity of individual molecules in food … and we experience that excitement as heat!)./p

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a href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/book_reviews/book_review_inventors_and_innovations_edited_by_duncan_mccorquodale_16869.asp”(more…)/a
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