商品簡介
Declaring that "a wartless Watt would be no Watt at all," Marsden (cultural history, U. of Aberdeen, Scotland), shows how industrial icon James Watt owed his rise as much to espionage and political maneuvering as to creativity and determination. Watt, apocryphally inspired by his mother's teakettle, created the steam engine both a progenitor of the Industrial Age and a symptom of its problems. Watt and his partner fought to maintain a 25-year monopoly on steam power that stifled innovation and crushed competition. The inventor also was raised to near saint status and still, in the name of a universal unit of power, "haunts the language of science and glows discreetly in every electrical light." The tidy little (4.75x7.25<">) volume includes a glossary but omits an index. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
作者簡介
Ben Marsden is a lecturer in cultural history and the history of science at the University of Aberdeen.
