I have a relatively large collection of books on science and technology, including the history thereof. There are many reasons for this set of interests, but certainly one of them is that in our research on collaboration we have studied scientific collaboration a lot. In order to study such collaboration, one must learn something about the science itself. I suppose the other major reason for this interest is that from the 17th century on science has been a major part of history, and therefore an allied component to any interest in modern history.
Edward Dolnick. The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society and the Birth of the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
As the author points out at the beginning of his final chapter, in 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for claiming that the Earth was not at the center of the universe. But in 1705, Isaac Newton was knighted by the queen of England for essentially confirming in the most convincing manner that Bruno was correct. The world changed radically in the 17th century, and this is the story of how that happened. A whole array of people, such as Galileo, Halley, Kepler, Newton Leibniz, and many others, were the agents of change. The mysteries of the prior religious phenomena were replaced by the mystery of a mathematically defined gravitational force that gave the clockwork universe its relentless but highly orchestrated dance. Mathematics itself was transformed by the invention of the calculus, an interesting story in itself about how Newton and Leibniz independently worked it out, and then quarreled the rest of their lives over credit for it. Much of the story Dolnick describes focuses on Newton, whose extraordinary intellectual achievements have ever since stunned those who digested what he did. But his work benefited from the inspired work of countless others, and though Newton claimed that he has stood on the shoulders of giants, he was a strange, egotistical person, whose powers of concentration and his lack of interest in the normal affairs of most humans set him apart.
Paul Ehrlich. Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.
Paul Ehrlich is an American biologist, probably best known for his book The Population Bomb, but has had a long and rich career studying butterflies, and a variety of other insects and interesting zoological phenomena. He is also widely known in professional circles for the idea of coevolution, for example how insects and the plants they interact with evolve in mutually supportive fashion. He had a rich and close personal and professional relationship with his wife, Anne. Her first contribution to their joint work was to provide very detailed illustrations for the1961 book How to Know the Butterflies, which were helped by dissections and very close study of the various butterflies covered in the book. Indeed, this work first began when she provided drawings for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Kansas, and as he stated, “We have now done research and writing together for over sixty-five years. As he said, the decision to marry Anne was “by far the best decision of my life.”
Interestingly, Paul and Anne wrote The Population Bomb together in just a few weeks, but the publisher, Ian Ballentine, took Anne’s name off the book just before it was published. Paul vowed this would never happen again, and noted “Anne has coauthored many Ehrlich books with equal billing subsequently, …and at least half of anything I’ve accomplished, and any awards I’ve received, I owe to her.” Another important project was writing the first modern environmental textbook, Population, Resources, and Environment, done jointly with Anne. It was widely adopted, and went through three editions. As they reached middle age, they took up another mutual interest, the study of fine wines. They also both acquired pilot licenses, and used small aircraft to reach remote sites for much of their research.
This rich memoir is well worth the read.
Jordan Ellenberg. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
Jordan Ellenberg. Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else. New York: Penguin Press, 2021.
These two highly readable books are very similar: they draw illuminating and mostly qualitative conclusions about the relevance of mathematics and geometry to countless aspects of everyday life. Ellenberg’s accounts are clear, often witty, and always eye opening. And the range of topics addressed is awe inspiring: baseball, elections, chance, the existence of God, and many, many more. These are two wonderfully entertaining and insightful reads.
David Alan Grier. When Computers Were Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
I don’t think it is widely known that the term “computer” was first used to refer to people (alas, mostly women) who historically carried out large scale computing projects. Grier presents the remarkable history of the phenomena associated with humans doing computation. Though there are hints that such phenomena go back to the ancients, the widespread use of humans to do computations has at least a 200-year history. In the 18th century humans were used to calculate the information required to predict the return of Halley’s comet. Such astronomical calculations continued to use human computers up until the mid 20th century. Such uses of humans to calculate tables of information for a wide range of scientific and engineering flourished in the 19th and early 20th century. Interestingly, Grier discovered that his own grandmother, who got a mathematics degree in the early 20th century from the University of Michigan, was a classmate of five other women who went on the perform computing tasks of the sort Grier goes on the document in great detail. Altogether, an amazing set of stories.
Andrew Hodges. Alan Turing: The Enigma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. [Centenary Edition in 2012 with new preface by the author]
This is the definitive biography of Turing. He is the pioneer of so much about computing, both theoretically and practically. He developed theoretical frameworks — the Turing Machine, the Turing Test among them — that have influenced so much subsequent thinking. He participated in the building of several computing machines, both during World War II and afterwards. His role in the decryption of the Nazi codes during World War II was noteworthy, though Hodges — much better than the movie The Imitation Game — does a much better job of articulating the roles of all of those involved in this key effort. And of course his tragic entanglements due to his homosexuality are a vivid illustration of the biases and practices of an earlier era. Read Hodges superb biography for a proper account of this interesting and complex man.
Walter Isaacson. The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.
The last decade has seen a revolution in our ability to edit DNA, with the prospect of ridding ourselves of genetically based illness but also opening the door to all kinds of genetic manipulations, including enhancements of human characteristics. Jennifer Doudna has been at the center of this revolution, though as Isaacson documents in great detail, huge numbers of others contributed essential knowledge to the overall enterprise. For her role, Doudna received the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry, shared with her co-worker Emmanuelle Charpentier. The mix of collaboration and competition is evident throughout the story. And, in an appropriate denouement to the decade, the techniques unearthed in these developments led directly to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. Isaacson is a master biographer, as can be seen throughout this bookshelf. Interestingly, he learns first-hand the techniques of gene editing in putting together this story, and he volunteers as a subject in the clinical trial of the Pfizer vaccine. He also grapples in detail with the moral and ethical issues that surround the emergence of the CRISPR technology that is at the heart of this story.
Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Walter Isaacson is one of my favorite biographers — more of his books will be appearing here soon. This one I read when it first came out, and I was recently motivated (2017) to read it again. I almost always love rereading — especially books that I marked up before. Isaacson’s account of Einstein is masterful, in that he not only recounts the details of Einstein’s life, but goes into great detail about his ideas. And Einstein’s ideas have of course puzzled many. But Isaacson is masterful in explaining them in terms we can mostly understand. This is so appropriate for Einstein, who reveled in thought experiments to generate his ideas, even if they were eventually cast in complex mathematical terms. He often had help from others, including his first wife, with the latter, and even late in life complained that he didn’t know enough math. His life was so tangled up in the events of history — his strong pacifism during World War I, his early and growing persecution with the rise of Hitler in Germany, his flight to the US in the early 1930s, his involvement with the early stages of the development of the atomic bomb, including his famous letter to Roosevelt, his interactions with Zionists and the emergence of Israel (even being offered the Presidency of that land in the early 1950s), and his encounters with the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. He had an intense curiosity, a deep non-conformist attitude, and a belief in the underlying wonder and beauty of the natural world. After his numerous early breakthroughs, particularly the special and general theories of relativity, his later long-lasting pursuit of a unified field theory led nowhere. Yet he was making notes about this in his hospital bed in his last hours. He is certainly one of the most extraordinary personas of the 20th century.
Michael Lewis. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017.
This is the story of the collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that radically transformed how we think about such key topics as judgement and decision making, and influenced the thinking of fields such as economics to the extent that Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Sadly, Amos Tversky had died before this so given that these can only be awarded to living scholars, was only recognized in Kahneman’s Nobel acceptance speech. But of course anyone familiar with contemporary psychology or economics knows the extent of Tversky’s involvement in this work. It’s a story of an incredible collaboration, that in Lewis’ rendering has many of the symptoms of romantic love (but without the sex, as he points out). However, it was not an easy partnership, as the two participants had many personality differences. But it worked in ways that forever changed how we think about how the mind works. As a psychologist myself, I participated in the appearance of this work — taught it in my classes, and was thoroughly influenced in my thinking. I had met both of them at various times, but was never especially close to either of them. I was very much aware of the attempt in 1979 to hire both of them and their spouses at the University of Michigan, a recruitment known internally at Michigan as trying to land “the Jerusalem Quartet,” an event mentioned in Lewis’ book. It was an extraordinary move by Michigan, but in the end Amos and his wife Barbara went to Stanford and Daniel and his wife — Anne Treisman — went to the University of British Columbia. As Lewis points out, their most amazing years were when both were at Hebrew University in Israel. Both were in the Israeli military, and participated in the several wars that occured during their adulthood. Lewis presents the core of their work clearly and with excellent accounting of the context and impact of it. He also has useful stories of those who either worked with them or were influenced by them. It’s a totally readable account of one of the greatest stories in psychology in the later decades of the twentieth century.
Jim Ottaviani & Leland Purvis. The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded. New York: Abrams Comic Arts, 2016.
This is a comic version of a Turing biography. Ottaviani scripted it, and Purvis did the illustrations. It was an unusual experience for me reading this. First of all, I could read the entire biography in one evening. I guess the picture being a thousand words is part of the reason why. But of course, unlike reading straight text, the illustrations provide a concrete interpretation of a given scene or event. Having read a lot about Turing, including Hodges’ masterful biography described above, likely also helped my brisk path through this one. As a curiosity, I have acquired a couple of other comic biographies: one of Richard Feynman, also by Ottaviani, and another of Charles Darwin. This is certainly an interesting genre, though I don’t know what it would be like reading them as the first introduction to a particular historical figure.
Virginia Postrel. The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
I hadn’t really given this topic much thought, but the underlying premise of this delightful book is so true: textiles have been a key aspect of civilization. And not just the clothes we wear. As Postrel points out early, the so-called Stone Age could just as well have been called the string age, as early strings were used in so many ways. Shaped stones were tied with string to wooden handles to make tools or weapons. String was used to create nets that were used to catch fish or create baskets that allowed things to be carried. As threads were created and used to make clothing, they also were used to make sails on ships, blankets, wrappers, etc. The first four chapters trace the history of the key components: fibers, thread, cloth, dye. But these elements became clear components of commerce, and much of the technologies of commerce were created around the trading of threads, cloths, clothing, dyes. The users of these things of course created reasons for trade. But users also often resorted to conquest and control. Needs for technology to accomplish all these things led to scores of innovations. But the shortcomings of so-called “natural” fibers and dyes lead to innovations that drove the chemical industries. Fibers like nylon created all manner of new things, such as nylon stockings and reliable parachutes. All these things and more are covered in clear and engaging prose. Like me, you will find all manner of insights into the history of civilization as manifested in textiles.
Jennifer Potter. Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants. London: Atlantic Books, 2006.
This most interesting family plays a peculiar role in the history of science. John the elder, and his son the younger, and the latter’s wife Hester, were passionate collectors of all manner of curiosities. Their extraordinary collection later became the basis of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. The reason for the name of the museum is that Elias Ashmole essentially hoodwinked Hester out of ownership of the collection, and then “generously” donated the collection to Oxford. Potter’s fascinating biography traces the ins and outs of this curious family. By the way, all of this happens in the 17th century!
Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
The title of this book is pretty self-explanatory. It is the interesting and complex story of how the atomic bomb came to be. It all happened in a relatively short time, given how difficult it was. But the US, unlike either Japan or Germany, had the industrial might as well as the will to proceed to turn the theoretical insights of physicists into the weapon that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of the rich technical details are here. So are the myriad political, social, and moral issues that surrounded the project and its ultimate deployment. I read this when it appeared over 30 years ago, and I will re-read it again soon. It’s technical history at its best.
Richard Rhodes. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
This is the companion piece to the previous book. It describes how the hydrogen bomb, or “Super,” as it was called, came into being not long after the atomic bomb. It was both cause and effect of the terrifying nuclear stalemate of the Cold War. Rhodes describes how the Soviet Union quickly became a nuclear power, based almost entirely on espionage that transferred the US secrets to Soviet scientists and engineers. And a similar progression followed when the US, guided by the mysterious Edward Teller, developed the hydrogen bomb, an increase in power that even surprised those who developed it. Rhodes covers not just the story of how the Super came to be, but what the ensuing years of nuclear confrontation were like. It’s a scary story. Air Force General Curtis LeMay was a frightening character, pushing for him to have control of nuclear weapons and wanting to use them. It took masterful diplomacy, and no small measure of luck, to avoid a nuclear confrontation that worried all of us who grew up during those years. Rhodes again masters the necessary mix of technical, social, political, and moral issues involved in this key phase of 20th century history.
Richard Rhodes. Energy: A Human History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018..
Energy is at the heart of human activity. Whether we’re talking about the muscles of an individual or the complex grid of a modern electrical infrastructure, it is what kind of energy and its distribution that shapes what we can do. Rhodes traces 400 years of this story. It does not go back to the beginnings, when human muscles either individually or collectively, shaped how human life proceeded among the earliest human societies. I read another book by Vaclav Smil that takes a longer view, and describe it below. But Rhodes story takes us from the invention of steam as a way of creating energy that through successive innovations led to the industrial revolution and all of its concomitant good and bad features, up to the most recent innovations in nuclear power and such alternative renewals as wind and sun. It’s an amazing set of stories, and while we probably all new many of the names — Watt, Stephenson, Faraday, Edison, Westinghouse,, Drake, Fermi, etc. — there are many surprising names he introduces as creative people who came up with insights or improvements that made various energy sources work. And there are the usual detours and unexpected issues, such as pollution (coal, oil) or fear (e.g., nuclear power) that influence public policy and the adoption of energy sources. It’s a rich read, and he concludes with optimism about the future. By the way, as a footnote, Rhodes’ oeuvre is simply extraordinary — this recent volume lists 22 other books on a wide range of topics that he has written.
Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling & Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books, 2018.
Hans Rosling is a famous health educator. His talks, given all over the world, and available as stunning videos, are extraordinary testimony to the importance of facts. His focus has been the arena of public health, and lots of the material in this book is taken from that. But the lessons he draws are relevant everywhere. Over and over he shows that what people, even highly educated ones, believe and think, is wrong, often wildly wrong. He asks multiple choice questions, where many respondents are significantly worse than chance! This book is organized around ten faulty instincts in reasoning that he elaborates upon with examples. These lessons need to be learned by everyone, because otherwise bad decisions will be made — and often have been already. His two collaborators are long-term associates of his who are the developers of many of the amazing visualizations he uses in his lectures, and in this book. There is a sad footnote. Hans Rosling died before the book was finished, but his two collaborators, who were of course intimately familiar with the material, were able to bring it to an excellent conclusion.
Margot Lee Shetterly. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.
This is a truly remarkable book, about computers who are human, in this case, black women who were an integral part of aviation research in the 1940s and 1950s, and the space race in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. They were first hired during World War II, when a shortage of male talent led to the hiring of women trained in mathematics, including many from black colleges and schools. They were hired into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The black women were organized into a segregated group, the West Area Computers, where they carried out mathematical calculations that helped refine the performance of World War II aircraft. The book traces the remarkable history of extraordinary talent sequestered in a segregated organization, living in a segregated state, yet making landmark contributions to the science and engineering of aviation in the 1940s and 1950s, and the conquest of space after that. While the Langley Laboratory slowly integrated itself, though with many challenges, the state of Virginia around it was one of the most segregated of all of them. Virginia defied Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, and even went so far in Prince Edward County to take away all funding of public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate them. But the black women computers strove on, contributing magnificently to the Mercury space program and the later Gemini and Apollo programs. As digital computers began supplementing and then replacing the human computers, it was black women who were charged with checking the output of the digital computers to make sure they were working correctly. They evolved into FORTRAN programmers, and indeed did the key calculations behind the Apollo moon landings. As the author says in the Epilogue, the most surprising question of all is why we did not know all of this until now. That’s what many who exit the movie version of this also say.
This is an amazing example of the story of humans as computers that is described more broadly in David Alan Grier’s book, When Computers Were Human, reviewed above.
Rebecca Skloot. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.
This is an extraordinary story. It’s about a poor black woman whose cells were captured by the medical establishment, and became the key to many subsequent breakthroughs. But they were taken without her or her families permission, have been commercialized and laden many pockets with wealth, yet her family cannot even afford health insurance. Skloot traces the remarkable story of the fate of Ms. Lacks’ cells, the twists and turns in uncovering their origin, and the many people affected — positively and negatively — of the incredible cell line.
Vaclav Smil. Energy and Civilization: A History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
The dust jacket on my copy of this book quotes Bill Gates: “Smil is one of my favorite authors. The term ‘polymath’ was made for people like him….I learn more by reading Vaclav Smil than just about anyone else.” Having read this comprehensive and engaging history of energy, I find Gates’ sentiments spot on. Having recently read Richard Rhodes’ book on energy (reviewed above), this is a wonderful complement. While it covers some of the same ground, it does it in a deeply quantitative and insightful fashion. Further, it goes back to the beginning, to hunter gatherers relying primarily on food to energize their own muscles, and traces all the subsequent energy related innovations. As Smil says as he opens the history, “Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done [p. 1].” Unpacking this over the course of human history is the purpose of the book. As he points out in a brief Preface, he had written a similar history in the early 1990s, but this volume takes advantage of the considerable advances in energy scholarship since then — much of it by Smil himself — to provide a much richer history. The story is laced with interesting visuals and frequent informative side boxes. It has made me think about energy and its implications in totally new ways.
Vaclav Smil. How the World Really Works: The Sciences Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going. New York: Viking, 2022.
This is Vaclav Smil’s analysis of the science behind climate change. His bottom line is that reducing the amount of carbon we pour into the atmosphere will be a huge challenge, because carbon emissions are such a pervasive aspect of the things that make modern life. He focuses on four things in particular: steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics. All these are critical to the way modern societies work, and will be essential for developing countries to create the food supplies, housing, and infrastructures to get their economies to sustainable levels. His analysis is sobering, but important. To take one example, the rollout of electric cars, trucks, and buses is going much slower than hoped for because of the complexities involved in their manufacture, especially the batteries to make them work. And they are still too expensive for most drivers. Similar analyses apply to agriculture. He does not say we should give up, but he just stresses the complexities involved in achieving real progress.
Laura J. Snyder. Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.
This interesting volume explores how the emergence of optical instruments changed how both artists and scientists came to see the world. Leeuwenhoek, of course, carried out an amazing array of observations using a microscope. Vermeer is now widely believed to have used a camera obscura to create images of the world that he could study, and perhaps even copy (though this latter claim is controversial). Along with Grayling’s The Age of Genius, this book got me interested in reading more widely about the 17th century.
Rebecca Solnit. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Eadweard Muybridge was a truly extraordinary person. His major claim to fame is coming up with methods for taking high speed photographs. One of the classic uses of these methods was to settle a bet involving Leland Stanford as to whether while galloping there is ever a time when all of the horse’s feet were off the ground. Stanford let him set up his cameras at his ranch in Palo Alto (later the site of Stanford University), and the resulting high speed photos showed that indeed there were moments when all of the horses feet were off the ground. This technology was at the heart of the emergence of the motion picture industry. Muybridge of course photographed many other things than galloping horses. His studies of animals and people in motion are justifiably famous. We even have a volume of his photographs in our art collection. Solnit argues in this interesting volume that Muybridge was part and parcel of a uniquely Californian environment that led to not just the movie industry but eventually Silicon Valley. Muybridge himself is a fascinating character, and Solnit captures in beautiful prose the many facets of this man’s most interesting life.
Jimmy Soni & Bob Goodman. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
This is an excellent biography of one of the major figures in the creation of the information age. His major intellectual contribution was of course the paper, “A mathematical theory of communication,” first published in the Bell System Technical Journal, and later published in book form along with Warren Weaver. It transformed the study of communication, and laid out a vocabulary for the automation of computation. Shannon grew up in Michigan, and was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, with a dual major in mathematics and engineering. He pursued at PhD at MIT, and had a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His major work on communication theory was done while he was on the staff of Bell Laboratories, and later he was a faculty member at MIT. But he was a lifelong tinkerer. He made a small computer that played chess end games. He made a wearable computer, along with Edward Thorpe, that they used to calculate roulette odds. After a brief trial in Las Vegas, they abandoned the project out of fear of the Mafia behind many of the casinos in that city. He was a reasonably highly skilled juggler (though he never got past modest attempts at juggling four objects), and with parts from an erector set, build a robot that could juggle. All in all, his remarkable life is clearly told in this well-written volume.
Tom Standage. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. New York: Walker & Company, 1998.
Telegraphy is an interesting interim technology that had important characteristics of both what came before and after. Standage reviews its interesting history, from optical versions to electrical ones, with widespread skepticism about whether this was a workable idea. But when it finally emerged as something that worked, it was remarkable in its influence. From a world where the fastest means of communication were horseback riders on land and ships at sea, the telegraph made more or less instantaneous worldwide communication possible across the entire planet. It radically transformed business, stock markets, shipping, railroads, newspapers, diplomacy, and so many other things. The idea that information could be conveyed almost instantaneously, had a profound impact on a world where information flows had previously been measured in days, weeks, and months. Now it was seconds. And, of course, those bent on evil figured out a wide variety of ways to take advantage of this change. What’s most remarkable about this technology is that although there were attempts in the early 19th century, it was not until about 1850 that these things actually worked and propagated. Yet by the turn of the century, the telephone essentially silenced this medium. I know that in my youth, you could still send a telegram — mid 20th century. But it was a fringe medium. And, in so many ways, as Standage points out, it parallels things like e-mail and the Internet in the 20th century. As both Henry Petroski and Vint Cerf say on the cover blurb of the early hardback version that I own, “I was simply fascinated by this book.”
Donald E. Stokes. Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997.
This volume, which I read around the time it came out, has had an enormous impact on my world view. It contrasts the traditional linear view of the relationship between applied and basic science with a new proposal, namely, that the pursuit of basic knowledge and the solving of practical problems are two dimensions of a 2×2 table. A given kind of investigation can be high or low on either dimension. His examples are Niels Bohr, high on basic knowledge but essentially not interested in applications. Thomas Edison is low on basic knowledge but high on applications. His poster child, Pasteur, is high on both, seeking both to help French farmers but also interested in figuring out why. I’ve long felt that the best HCI and CSCW research occupies Pasteur’s Quadrant. An interesting quadrant is the one that is low on both. I came to believe that someone like John Tradescant (both the Elder and the Younger) who systematically collected all kinds of things with no particular goal in mind is an example. This collection became the basis of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which of course has been a valuable resource for all kinds of scholars. A fascinating read about the Tradescants and Elias Ashmole, who appropriated the Tradescant collection and gave it to Oxford (hence the name of the museum) is Jennifer Potter, Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants, which I describe in more detail above.
Adrian Tinniswood. The Royal Society & The Invention of Modern Science. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
This slim volume traces the history of the Royal Society from its formation in 1660 up until the prosent. It focuses mostly on its earliest years, as it struggled for identity and mission. Paradoxically, though its mission was to promote “natural philosophy,” as the early efforts at science as we know it were called, it took a long time for it to have primarily scientists as its members. Membership was often offered to those with money or political connections, in an effort to give it a more stable grounding. It founded the first scientific journal, but again it took a long time for it to become the respected scientific resource that it is today. It’s long colorful history has many twists and turns, and numerous interesting personas. While its wide variety of early investigations left it open to ridicule, by the 19th and 20th centuries it had become one of the most prestigious scientific organizations on the planet.
Simon Winchester. The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineering Created the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.
This is the story of how the history of attempts at achieving remarkable physical precision has had enormous effects on how the modern world has involved. It spans history from the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution up to the latest challenges in the miniaturization of integrated circuit technology. And these trends have produced all manner of social and moral concerns. For instance, precision machining in Great Britain led to the displacement of many jobs, resulting in the Luddites who violently objected. But errors in miniaturization led to a near catastrophic engine explosion of a Qantas Airbus 380 double-decker commercial airliner. And tiny discrepancies in the fabrication of the Hubble Space Telescope made that expensive tool nearly useless until imaginative engineers figured out a fix. He traces the evolution of GPS systems to current state-of-the-art accuracy that is now standard in cars and cell phones. One of my favorite chapters is the later one on the interesting duality of Seiko, who on the one hand makes inexpensive quarts watches that revolutionized personal timekeeping but at the same time have expert craftsmen and -women continue to make the classic Grand Seiko watch that still has a robust market. He describes Japanese culture that on the one hand values accuracy and precision (e.g., fast trains that run on time) but still loves the beautiful objects of labor intensive human crafts. A final Afterward traces the evolution of standards of measurement that itself is full of interesting twists and turns. Altogether, this is classic Simon Winchester, with a lovely mix of deep scholarship and witty writing.
Andrea Wulf. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
As Andrea Wulf points out, Alexander von Humboldt is hardly remembered in the English-speaking world. Yet he was one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. The centenary of his birth in 1969 was celebrated all over the planet, including in the US. Yet today few know who he was. He was amazingly influential. Darwin would not have gone on his cruise aboard the Beagle if he had not read Humboldt’s work. Ditto for Henry David Thoreau. He almost single-handedly created the science of “ecology,” so dubbed by one of his many admirers, Ernst Haeckel. John Muir’s life was totally influenced by his reading and rereading of Humboldt. Wulf’s book is a masterpiece. She covers his amazing, long life (he died just short of his 90th birthday), and his rich interactions with contemporaries like Goethe, Simon Bolivar, and Thomas Jefferson. His views of the unity of nature and the meshing of science and art are to this day extraordinary and insightful.
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