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How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon
- The Story of the 19th-Century Innovators Who Forged Our Future
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
The rich and fascinating history of the scientific revolution of the Victorian Era, leading to transformative advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.
With their expert culture of accuracy and precision, they created telegraphs and telephones, electric trams and railways, built machines that could think, and devised engines that could reach for the skies. When Cyrus Field's audacious plan to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic finally succeeded in 1866, it showed how science, properly disciplined, could make new worlds. As crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the exhibitions its success inaugurated, they came to see the future made fact—to see the future being built before their eyes.
In this rich and absorbing audiobook, a distinguished historian of science tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage's dream of mechanizing mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel's tunnel beneath the Thames to George's Cayley's fantasies of powered flight and Nikola Tesla's visions of an electrical world, it is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures—a rich tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took mankind to the Moon.
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Two of the boldest and most creative scientists of all time were Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). This is the story of how these two men - separated in age by 40 years - discovered the existence of the electromagnetic field and devised a radically new theory which overturned the strictly mechanical view of the world that had prevailed since Newton's time.
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Amazing narration of an incredibly well told story
- By Paul de Jong on 03-01-21
By: Nancy Forbes, and others
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The Problem of Increasing Human Energy
- By: Nikola Tesla
- Narrated by: Ryan Jarvis
- Length: 2 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Written in 1900 by Nikola Tesla, this book gives great ideas on automation, agriculture, energy, and increasing human output to improve the human condition.
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boring
- By Amazon Customer nutbutter on 09-10-17
By: Nikola Tesla
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Einstein's War
- How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I
- By: Matthew Stanley
- Narrated by: Matthew Stanley
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Few recognize how the Great War, the industrialized slaughter that bled Europe from 1914 to 1918, shaped Einstein’s life and work. While Einstein never held a rifle, he formulated general relativity blockaded in Berlin, literally starving. He lost 50 pounds in three months, unable to communicate with his most important colleagues. Some of those colleagues fought against rabid nationalism; others were busy inventing chemical warfare - scientists trapped in the power plays of empire. Meanwhile, Einstein struggled to craft relativity and persuade the world that it was correct.
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When will I learn?
- By Paul on 01-01-20
By: Matthew Stanley
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The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution
- A Captivating Guide to the Age of Reason and a Period of Major Industrialization
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Jason Zenobia
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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If you want to discover the captivating history of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, then this two-in-one books bundle is for you. Includes: Age of Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution.
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Great overview of the subject
- By Vanimal on 09-20-23
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Conquering the Electron
- The Geniuses, Visionaries, Egomaniacs, and Scoundrels Who Built Our Electronic Age
- By: Derek Cheung, Eric Brach
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Want to know how AT&T's Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology - and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work - and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place.
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Tech, science, engineering & the people behind it.
- By James S. on 05-29-20
By: Derek Cheung, and others
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- By: John Tresch
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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Know the Real Poe
- By Elliott Wolfe, M.D. on 06-28-21
By: John Tresch
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The Chip
- How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
- By: T.R. Reid
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Barely 50 years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vastly expensive thing that only a handful of scientists had ever seen. The world's brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.
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Great narration, sloppy writing
- By Constantly Learning on 10-06-22
By: T.R. Reid
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The Idea Factory
- Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
- By: Jon Gertner
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the1980s. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted nearly 15,000 employees, 1200 of whom held PhDs and 13 of whom won Nobel Prizes. Thriving in a work environment that embraced new ideas, Bell Labs scientists introduced concepts that still propel many of today’s most exciting technologies.
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Great story -- horrible pauses
- By Rodney on 01-29-13
By: Jon Gertner
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A Mind at Play
- How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- By: Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
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I wanted more information about Information Theory
- By Bonny on 05-08-18
By: Rob Goodman, and others
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The Age of Edison
- Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America
- By: Ernest Freeberg
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The late 19th century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but arguably the most important invention of all was Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb. Unveiled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1879, the light bulb overwhelmed the American public with the sense of the birth of a new age. More than any other invention, the electric light marked the arrival of modernity.
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great book
- By kyle on 03-10-16
By: Ernest Freeberg
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Drive!
- Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age
- By: Lawrence Goldstone
- Narrated by: Christopher Price
- Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed author of Birdmen comes a revelatory new history of the birth of the automobile - an illuminating and entertaining true tale of invention, competition, and the visionaries, hustlers, and swindlers who came together to transform the world. With a narrative as propulsive as its subject, Drive! plunges us headlong into a time unlike any in history, when manic innovation and consumerist zeal coalesced to forever change the way people got from one place to another.
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Ford Detractor.
- By Eric Johnston on 08-15-22