Facts And Inventions

This is one title in a series of reference books packed full of facts and statistics about a particular topic. The narrative is kept to a minimum to aid the most efficient access to facts, and dozens of maps and diagrams provide a visually engaging way of presenting information about inventions and discoveries.

A handsome, lavishly illustrated volume celebrates the human genius for invention from the dawn of civilization to the beginning of the new millennium.

James Boswell (1740–1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a generous and varied selection of Boswell’s journalistic writings, most of which have not been published since the eighteenth century. It offers a new angle on the history of journalism, an idiosyncratic view of literature, politics, and public life in late eighteenth-century Britain, and an original perspective on a complex and engaging literary personality.

A guide to ancient accomplishments and inventions unearths the origins of modern creations, including computers in ancient Greece, plastic surgery in India in the first century B.C., and a postal service in medieval Baghdad

"1001 inventions, official children's companion to the exhibition"--Cover.

If you've ever wondered why the pencil came into existence, or how a steam engine works, or when we started using flushing toilets, this book has all the answers. Based on seven key areas of invention, Adam Hart-Davis tells the stories behind steam power, lighting, toilets, clocks, communication, bikes and flight.

"The author is not taken by the universalizing claims of hermeneutics that everything is reducible to interpretation, but he is not interested in quarreling directly with those claims either. And with respect to the notion of invention - that things don't simply exist but are produced, made up - he likewise is interested neither in the objections usually brought against it nor in the strength of that notion in resisting them.