商品簡介
"William Rosen has written a most powerful story, one with a heroic cast of characters and an ingenious set of machines. His recounting of the invention of the steam engine puts it in the historical and cultural context that the achievement and its legacy deserve."---Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of civil engineering and professor of history, Duke University, author of The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems
"[A] fascinating, wide-ranging narrative ... a staggering work."---Kirkus Revies (starred review)
"Ambitious and learned ... Readers will be swept along by the strong current of Mr. Rosen's good-natured erudition."---The Economist
"Don't charge William Rosen with lack of ambition. Instead of biography or the thin slice of the past that has become popular with history publishers, he presents us with no less than the foundations of the modern world."---Baltimore Sun
"[Rosen] writes what might be called champagne prose: it slips down quick and easy but carries a punch. He covers not just the centers but the extremities of knowledge."---The Sunday Telegraph (London)
If all measures of human advancement in the last hundred centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost perfectly flat line-until-the eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution would cause the line to shoot straight up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress.
In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it---the steam engine. In the process he tackles the question that has obsessed historians ever since: What made eighteenth-century Britain such fertile soil for inventors? Rosen's answer focuses on a simple notion that had become enshrined in British law the century before: that people had the right to own and profit from their ideas.
The result was a period of frantic innovation revolving particularly around the promise of steam power. Rosen traces the steam engine's history from its early days as a clumsy but sturdy machine, to its coming-of-age driving the wheels of mills and factories, to its maturity as a transporter for people and freight by rail and by sea. Along the way we enter the minds of such inventors as Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, scientists including Robert Boyle and Joseph Black, and philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith---all of whose insights, tenacity, and ideas transformed first a nation and then the world.
William Rosen is a masterly storyteller with a keen eye for the "aha!" moments of invention and a gift for clear and entertaining explanations of science. The Most Powerful Idea in the World will appeal to readers fascinated with history, science, and the hows and whys of innovation itself.
作者簡介
William Rosen, the author of the award-winning history Justinian's Flea: Plague; Empire, and the Birth of Europe, was an editor and publisher at Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and the Free Press for nearly twenty-five years. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
