Lucidly written and generously illustrated in color, this volume of scientific history by award-winning inventor James Dyson details the greatest achievements of the human imagination since early hominids invented stone tools about 250,000 years ago. Through thousands of years and vital inventions more--the canoe, the wheel, ink and papyrus, language, maps, currency, law--the primitive hunter-gatherer of the Stone Age would evolve into the literate citizen of ancient Rome at the time of Christ, as the opening chapter of this fascinating chronicle shows. Succeeding chapters follow human technological advances up to the seventeenth century and then in the age of industrial power, the age of electricity, the atomic age, and the postwar world of the microchip and the genome.
