Technology Biography

Thomas Bayes was an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician whose obscure life belied the profound impact of his work. Like most research into probability at the time, his theorem - independently discovered a few years later by Pierre-Simon Laplace, the great French mathematician - was mainly seen as relevant to games of chance, like dice and cards. But its implications soon became clear, affecting fields as diverse as medicine, law and artificial intelligence.

Technically Tesla: The Engineering Behind the Revolution takes an in-depth look at the groundbreaking technologies and innovations that have propelled Tesla to the forefront of the electric vehicle and renewable energy industries. From the inception of its visionary electric vehicles to the cutting-edge advancements in energy storage and autonomous driving, this book explores the technical aspects that have made Tesla a game-changer in the world of transportation and clean energy.

Spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel tells the riveting story of the female pilots who each dreamed of being the first American woman in space. This dual biography of audacious trailblazers Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb presents these fascinating and fearless women in all their glory and grit, using their stories as guides through the shifting social, political, and technical landscape of the time.

The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: Rocket Scientist Killed in Pasadena Explosion. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene.

This is a self help-book like no other. Because you are not helping yourself, James Acaster is helping you. When James quit all forms of social media in 2019 he felt like he'd been born anew, but he was worried he'd suffer withdrawal and get lured back online to compete in a never ending popularity contest with only one possible winner (f--king Zuckerberg). He knew that in order to stay clean he'd have to replace everything social media used to give him with three-dimensional real-life activities.

Ten years ago the idea of getting into a stranger's car or walking into a stranger's home would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era: redefining neighborhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business, and changing the way we travel. In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, another generation of entrepreneurs is using technology to upend convention and disrupt entire industries.

When Thomas Edison began wiring New York City with a direct current electricity distribution system in the 1880s, he gave humankind the magic of electric light, heat, and power; in the process, though, he inadvertently opened a Pandora's Box of unimaginable illness and death. Dirty Electricity tells the story of Dr. Samuel Milham, the scientist who first alerted the world about the frightening link between occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields and human disease.

Daniel P. Todes provides concise introduction to the life and science of the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Beyond a basic biography, Todes devotes particular attention to Pavlov's Nobel Prize-winning research on digestion and his iconic studies of conditional reflexes and higher nervous activity, as well as his experiments with dogs. Todes shows that Pavlov was not a behaviorist, did not use a bell, and was uninterested in training dogs. The Russian scientist sought to explain not merely external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans.

In this scientifically informed account of the changes occurring in the world over the last century, award-winning broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough shares a lifetime of wisdom and a hopeful vision for the future.

Although Orville and Wilbur Wright are celebrated today as heroes for their revolutionary contributions to science and engineering - they are acknowledged as the first men to successfully achieve powered, piloted flight - their success was hard-earned. In fact, it took the self-taught engineers years of work and dozens of crashes before they managed a single 12-second flight! In this first installment of the brand new Epic Fails series, Ben Thompson and Erik Slader take listeners through the Wright brothers' many mishaps and misadventures as they paved the way for modern aviation.

In the mid-20th century, Michael S. Gazzaniga made one of the great discoveries in the history of neuroscience: split-brain theory, the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from each other and have different strengths.

Fascinated from an early age by the natural world in general and ants in particular, Edward Osborne Wilson's field work on them and on all social insects has vastly expanded our knowledge of their many species and fascinating ways of being. This work led to his 1975 book Sociobiology, which created an intellectual firestorm from his contention that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is governed by the laws of evolution and genetics. Subsequently, Wilson has become a leading voice on the crucial importance to all life of biodiversity.

In 1939, Richard Feynman, a brilliant graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. A lifelong friendship and enormously productive collaboration was born, despite sharp differences in personality. The soft-spoken Wheeler, though conservative in appearance, was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe. The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested. Yet they were complementary spirits.

After the end of World War II, the race for technological supremacy sped on. Top-secret research into ballistics and computing, begun during the war to aid those on the front lines, continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer—better known as the ENIAC. Proving Ground restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries.

This riveting biography from the American Bar Association visits the spectacular life of Edwin Land, breakthrough inventor. At the time of his death, he stood third on the list of our most prolific inventors, behind only Thomas Edison and one of Edison's colleagues. Land's most famous achievement was the creation of a revolutionary film-and-camera system that could produce a photographic print moments after the picture was taken.

This is the most comprehensive compilation of newspaper clippings and periodical articles assembled about Nikola Tesla. The entries range from August 14, 1886, to December 11, 1920. Comprising approximately 1,700 separate items, the collection includes both American and British publications and is reproduced directly from the original material.

In The Plant Hunter, Dr. Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell us the extraordinary story of her own journey. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida, the rolling hills of central Italy, isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo, and volcanic isles arising out of the Mediterranean - all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers, that could help save us all from the looming crisis of untreatable superbugs.

Over a 60-year career in public affairs, Vannevar Bush—engineer, inventor, educator, and public face of government-funded science—sought to eliminate roadblocks to innovation in science and technology. In Pieces of the Action, a collection of memoir-essays, he reflects on his role in shaping the policies and organizations that powered American research and development in the mid-20th century.

In Simply Gödel, Richard Tieszen traces Kurt Gödel’s life and career, from his early years in tumultuous, culturally rich Vienna to his many brilliant achievements as a member of IAS, as well as his repeated battles with mental illness. In discussing Gödel’s ideas, Tieszen not only provides an accessible explanation of the incompleteness theorems, but explores some of his lesser known writings, including his thoughts on time travel and his proof of the existence of God.

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none.