From Booklist

Fertile is the field of books about inventions. The very fecundity of works about human ingenuity begs for a less-detailed volume that is more comprehensive in scope, a role Dyson’s satisfyingly fills. In an arrangement partly encyclopedic and partly chronological, Dyson and his two dozen contributors divide all inventions into six periods; the breaks between periods are determined by when a technological era attained its acme, such as refinement of the steam engine (more…)