Reviews for The Age of Invention

The average rating for The Age of Invention based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-16 00:00:00 Tyson Basel A bilious sort of work, probably odd even in its own time (the early 70s) for its claims that Christianity was the driving force behind the European technics-leap and that other cultures, especially those poor Muslims and Chinese, were sorely lacking in any innovative drives, hence, their perennial backwardness. That the latter especially is patently false becomes clear by the author's own admission, his axiom lasting a mere handful of pages before he is forced to recognize the European debt to those very cultures for, well, pretty much everything. Noteworthy only for its dry, tedious technical descriptions of how things work, but eminently passable for its historiography.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-16 00:00:00 Wally Spear This was a quite comprehensive survey of the American fascination with technological innovation. Covering structures like bridges and skyscrapers, and forms of power including steam, electricity and nuclear reactions, the author makes a a consistent case, and to some degree makes observations about the American character. It's unfortunate that the book was published just as the next wave of technology (the Internet) was becoming popular, because it would have been interesting to see how or whether something as comparatively abstract as information and data would fit with the definition of sublime, or perhaps be, in some way, the ultimate example of the technological sublime (transcending the individual.)