A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush.”

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
Set in Edwardian London and on the

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Simon Baron-Cohen reveals the surprising answer to two apparently distinct questions: Why are humans so inventive? And why does autism exist? The first question hangs over almost every human endeavor: business people want to know how to innovate. Cognitive psychologists want to understand the nature of creativity. Evolutionary scientists and comparative psychologists want to understand why we are capable of such cultural complexity and diversity,...

Jorisch profiles Israeli innovations that are collectively changing the lives of billions of people around the world, and explores why Israeli innovators of all faiths feel a compulsion to make the world better. Israel plays a disproportionate role in helping solve some of the world's biggest challenges by tapping into the nation's soul: the spirit of tikkun olam-- the Jewish concept of repairing the world. This is the collective story of how Israelis...

"Nikola Tesla has come to be seen by many as a tragic figure, a visionary engineer who died impoverished and largely forgotten--eclipsed by names such as Edison and Marconi. A tireless inventor who registered numerous patents and developed many working prototypes, Tesla would become most famous for his dazzling demonstrations. Audiences flocked to see him send thousands of volts of electricity pulsing through his body, dazzled by the spectacle of...

Explores the complex alchemy that accounts for the enduring celebrity of America's most famous inventor, offering new perspectives on the man and his milieu. And illuminating not only the true nature of invention, but its role in turn-of-the-century America's rush into the future.

"The book follows author David Lang's headfirst dive into the maker world and shows how he grew from an unskilled beginner to be a successful entrepreneur. You'll discover how to navigate this new community of makers, and find the best resources for learning the tools and skills you need to be a dynamic maker in your own right"--Www.amazon.com.

Cute and clever, "A Bug's Life" is a relatively straight retelling of Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai," except of course that the characters are bugs! Idealistic young ant Flik is a sweet-natured dreamer and inventor. But his innovative thinking makes him an outcast when one of his inventions goes awry and destroys the food sacrifice that the colony makes annually to a gang of grasshopper hooligans led by the sinister Hopper. Disgraced, Flik is sent...

"The year is 1888 and Louis Le Prince is finally testing his "taker" or "receiver" device for his family on their front lawn. The device is meant to capture ten to twelve images per second on film, creating a reproduction of reality that can be replayed as many times as desired. In an otherwise separate and detached world, occurrences from one end of the globe could now be viewable with only a few days delay on the other side of the world. No human...

One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois-Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches, combined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his life easier. Then he went back and...