Best engineering patents & inventions books according to redditors
We found 16 Reddit comments discussing the best engineering patents & inventions books. We ranked the 11 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World. I read it after deciding to base my next writing project around mages who could imbibe common gunpowder to gain powers. Was very enjoyable and informative read.
Currently reading How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, which is going to influence my next trilogy (set a little further along in the Powder Mage universe's industrial revolution) a great deal.
According to the book How We Got to Now, people only realized they needed glasses after the printing press was invented—as books became more abundant, people had to focus their eyes on the letters up close (versus looking at their herds from afar, or something similar) and began realizing their sight was blurry. Unfortunately, glasses didn't exist at the time, but that's what spurred their invention.
So some people didn't really know they had poor eyesight. I'd bet they just lived with it, thinking it was typical.
Have you ever tried pouring water out of a bottle normally vs spinning the bottle to make vortex and pouring it out. The water will pour out faster because of the swirling.
This is an example of biomimetic fluid dynamics. It turns out water doesn’t travel most efficiently in a straight line like we usually try and force it to do. The most direct path of fluids in nature is a curving one. So this design induces a similar swirl to the water so it can drain faster than a more seemingly direct route.
This is the book where I learned this stuff from. It’s quite interesting.
[(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E257WF0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)]
A Most Damnable Invention tells the story of Nobel and dynamite very well.
I haven't read any of these books yet (except for the first one), but they're on my wishlist. I do have "Where is my Jetpack?" though and although it's an awesome, beautiful book, it might not be what you're looking for as it has original illustrations rather than vintage one.
Some suggestions:
Little Vintage Book of SciFi - Selections from vintage scifi comic books.
Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future
The Wonderful Future That Never Was
How We Got To Now by Steven Johnson, narrated by George Newbern.
First the good news - I really enjoyed this book. It looks at six different innovations and explains how they came to be and what unintended consequences they led to. I had previously listened to 'The Innovators' but felt it got bogged down in biographical details of the inventors themselves. This book is more about the ideas behind the inventions and how they led to often unpredictable developments in society, politics, and culture.
The bad news - I can't recommend it as an audiobook due to the narration by George Newbern. I've listened to a ton of audiobooks and never had a narrator ruin one for me like this. He has no flow in his sentences and fills them with Shatneresque pauses. He doesn't seem to understand the sentences themselves and puts paused in places that make no sense. I'm baffled how he has a job as an audiobook narrator and looking at his resume seems to record a great number of books.
So my recommendation is definitely read this book, but don't listen!
I am not totally sure what you are asking for actually exists in book form...which is odd, now that I think about it.
If it were me, I would think about magazines instead. And if you really want to push him, think about the following options:
If you insist on books...
I see you already mentioned A Brief History of the Universe, which is an excellent book. However, I am not sure if you are going to get something that is more "in depth." Much of the "in depth" stuff is going to be pretty pop, without the rigorous foundation that are usually found in textbooks.
If I had to recommend some books, here is what I would say:
Hope that helps! OH AND GO WITH THE SUBSCRIPTION TO NATURE
edit: added the linksssss
While you sure need engineering knowledge, learning inventiveness is something different
Two of the best books on the subject :
http://www.amazon.com/Trizics-yourself-impossible-technical-systematically/dp/1456319892/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408460727&sr=1-4&keywords=simplified+triz
http://www.amazon.com/Sparks-Genius-Thirteen-Thinking-Creative/dp/0618127453/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408464654&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=genius+bernstrein
I KNEW I recognized that picture. Bought this a year ago. It's a decent coffee table book for the price. A lot of cool pictures like this one.
Reading your entry reminded me of Steven Johnson's [How We Got to Now] (https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594632960) and namely the point he argues is opposite yours ... but sort of tangential.
The "lone inventor/genius" trope is generally a false one -- Edison was rather a PT Barnum-type of huckster -- he even claimed his lightbulbs would "never burn out" . . . if anything I'd put Musk and Jobs in this camp . . . a talking head on top of 10,000 employees doing hard work. Vision is important, don't get me wrong, but leadership and charisma are limited forms of "genius". Henry Ford was a weird thinker and an utterly ruthless capitalist -- not that that didn't lead him down the path to innovative solutions (like owning the whole supply chain, and inventing the charcoal briquette industry to find an outlet for his scrap wood).
Ideas and invention come about through not just one smart person, but rather many ideas being linked together (and you do hint at this also) but don't forget that timing is critical too. We have all seen fusion reactors and space industries move down from the government sector to the private sector not because "people are geniuses" but because computing and materials costs have dropped so much. Not to mention there's a whole generation of young people educated enough to run the computers.
Egypt was great not because of the pyramids, but because the could produce enough calories through farming to feed thousands of people and free them from the tedium of gathering food. They could then focus on art, culture, science, invention.
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Was-Wrong-Inventions-Impossible/dp/1601631022
we are limited to our accumulative knowledge we've acquired through science. its a great tool, and self-correcting in theory, but not immune to scrutiny and face palms.
have you ever thought about superfluity in design?
Answer: A misunderstanding of Kant.
But jokes aside, it seems to hinge on the claim that we do actually have access to the absolute. Meillassoux's argument is that the statements made by science about events that existed outside of possible experience do not make sense within the philosophies that start with the subject's mode of cognition (correlationism). Or else, their meaning for science is very different from their meaning once interpreted through correlationist philosophies. Correlationist philosophies always insert "givenness". "From evidence 'x', I conclude that the universe began 14 billion years ago" turns into something like "From evidence 'x', I conclude it is given to me that the universe began 14 billion years ago".
I used to be incredibly taken by it, but now tend to think it is a fairly naive critique of Kant. A much more interesting reflection on the contradiction between natural science and philosophies of the subject can be found in R. Scott Bakker's review of Catherine Malabou’s Before Tomorrow. Sorry for the massive quotes, but I'm confident you'll find it a fascinating perspective:
>To put it into Kantian terms, the cognitive sciences amount to a metacritique of reason, a multibillion dollar colonization of Kant’s traditional domain. […] The problem, in other words, is both epistemic and social. Epistemically, the reality of thought need not satisfy our traditional conceptions, which suggests, all things being equal, that it will very likely contradict them. And socially, no matter how one sets about ontologically out-fundamentalizing the sciences, the fact remains that ‘ontologically out-fundamentalizing’ is the very discursive game that is being marginalized—disenchanted.
and
>So what do we do with transcendental speculation a la Kant? Do we ignore what cognitive science has learned about the fractionation, limits, and default propensities of human metacognition? Do we assume he was onto something distinct, a second, physically inexplicable order enabling cognition of the empirical in addition to the physically explicable (because empirical) order that we know (thanks to strokes, etc.) enables cognition of the empirical? Or do we assume that Kant was onto something dimly, which, given his ignorance of cognitive science, he construed dogmatically as distinct? Do we recognize the a priori as a fetishization of medial neglect, as way to make sense of the fractionate, heuristic nature of cognition absent any knowledge of that nature?
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>The problem with defending the first, transcendental thesis is that the evidence supporting the second empirical hypothesis will simply continue to accumulate. This is where the social problem rears its head, why the kind of domain overlap demonstrated above almost certainly signals the doom of Malabou’s discursive tradition. Continental philosophers need to understand how disenchantment works, how the mere juxtaposition of traditional and scientific claims socially delegitimizes the former. The more cognitive science learns about experience and cognition, the less relevant and less credible traditional philosophical discourses on the nature of experience and cognition will become.
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>The cognitive scientific metacritique of reason, you could say, reveals the transcendental as an artifact of our immaturity, of an age when we hearkened to the a priori as our speculative authority.
and
>[…] rather than turn to cognitive science to “search for the origin of thinking outside of consciousness and will,” the Speculative Realists I encountered (with the exception of thinkers like David Roden) embraced traditional vocabularies. Their break with traditional Kantian philosophy, I realized, did not amount to a break with traditional intentional philosophy. Far from calling attention to the problem, ‘correlation’ merely focused intellectual animus toward an effigy, an institutional emblem, stranding the 21st century Speculative Realists in the very interpretative mire they used to impugn 20th century Continental philosophy. Correlation was a hopeful, but ultimately misleading diagnosis. The problem isn’t that cognitive systems and environments are interdependent, the problem is that this interdependence is conceived intentionally. Think about it. Why do we find the intentional interdependence of cognition and experience so vexing when the ecological interdependence of cognitive systems and environments is simply given in biology? What is it about intentionality?
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>[…] I’ve spent years now prospecting the desert of the real, the post-intentional landscape that, if I’m right, humanity is doomed to wander into and evaporate. I too was a Derridean once, so I know a path exists between her understanding and mine. I urge her to set aside the institutional defense mechanisms as I once did: charges of scientism or performative contradiction simply beg the question against the worst-case scenario. I invite her to come see what philosophy and the future look like after the death of transcendence, if only to understand the monstrosity of her discursive other. I challenge her to think post-human thoughts—to understand cognition materially, rather than what traditional authority has made of it. I implore her to see how the combination of science and capital is driving our native cognitive ecologies to extinction on an exponential curve.
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>And I encourage everyone to ask why, when it comes to the topic of meaning, we insist on believing in happy endings? We evolved to neglect our fundamental ecological nature, to strategically hallucinate spontaneities to better ignore the astronomical complexities beneath. Subreption has always been our mandatory baseline. As the cognitive ecologies underwriting those subreptive functions undergo ever more profound transformations, the more dysfunctional our ancestral baseline will become. With the dawning of AI and enhancement, the abstract problem of meaning has become a civilizational crisis.
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>Best we prepare for the worst and leave what was human to hope.
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Check out "How We Got To Now" by Steven Johnson http://amzn.com/B00INIXU5I
You're thinking far too small. We don't need to leave the solar system to find other environments to live - we can easily (relatively speaking) create such places here in the solar system, almost anywhere we choose. If your conception is that we have to live on a planetary body, jettison it, and you'll find a lot more options open up. Within current engineering ability, we can build large, earthlike habitats that offer 1G.
It's not about saving a few thousand people, or about the very richest of humanity escaping. It's about using the resources of space in a big way to both enrich those on Earth, by providing lots of clean energy from space, and seeing millions of people living and working offworld. We have the ability to do it, and if we use it wisely, it will help us clean up Earth faster than expecting all our solutions to come from what we have on Earth itself.
For a more hopeful view of the future than what you see, I seriously recommend reading both of these books: The High Frontier and 2081. I think you'll find that there's a lot more to recommend to space travel and use than what the public has been exposed to through decades of government dominance.