Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?

I'm interested primarily in serious work -- books and papers -- probably by technology history professors and the like, but pop books are fine, too.

Thanks.

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Here are some histories of specific industries I've read recently and supremely enjoyed:

- The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

- The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry

- Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World

- Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (of all of these not the most amazing but still interesting)

- The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War

And then you can learn a lot by reading about the people who built the industries too. Here are a few I've been reading about recently that I recommend:

- Edison by Edmund Morris (Just read it backwards, you'll see.)

- Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

- The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

- Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

I also got some interesting suggestions asking a similar question on Twitter a bit ago.

https://twitter.com/eatonphil/status/1668625835350454273

+1 to “The People’s Tycoon”

What do you recommend for the history of how technology was first invented?

What do you think of the Novum Organum by Sir Francis Bacon, who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I?

https://libquotes.com/francis-bacon/quote/lbz2z1a

Have you looked for online courses? Here are a few of the books I'd go through around computers, but are you thinking more extensive history of "technology?" Like how we've grown from printing press as innovation?

Soul of a New Machine is a great non-fiction but reads like a fiction account of trying to overtake the Vax by building one of the first 32-bit machines https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316...

A Biography of the Pixel https://www.amazon.com/Biography-Pixel-Leonardo-Alvy-Smith/d... great overview of the innovation and math that pushed graphics forwrard

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1... walks through information theory and how we got to the internet

Dealers of lightning: https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-of-Lightning-audiobook/dp/B00... how a lot of modenr computing grew out of Xerox

+1 for "The Information". i can here specifically to recommend this book. Such a great read, i would even venture are saying a must read for anybody even remotely interested in computer science.

+1 for The Information. Spectacular book

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage is one of my favorites.

It talks about how the telegraph brought near instantaneous communication and how that changed the world. He gives specific examples for finance, newspapers and even the law ("Can you approve a contract over the telegraph?")

What I found most interesting:

I read this book in the late 2000s/early 2010s and remember thinking "Wow! This is is EXACTLY what's happening now with newspapers. When was this written?" and seeing that the original copy came out in 1998!

I also wanted to mention the "cousins" of:

> "Can you approve a contract over the telegraph?"

- Is a faxed copy of a signed contract legally binding?

- Is an email scan of a signed contract legally binding?

+1 for The Victorian Internet. A fascinating book.

His descriptions of how the telegraph disrupted people's existing understanding of distance and time/simultaneity are very interesting.

People thinking that the physical telegraph form was transmitted, rather than just its content, and demanding to telegraph other physical objects.

Also the use of commercially published word-books to shorten and obfuscate long telegraph messages is reminiscent of data compression and cryptography today.

Lewis Mumford wrote some very interesting books about technology and society:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Civilization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine

It's quite old and so doesn't include the rise of the Internet and subsequent innovations but, Accidental Empires is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires

Where Wizards Stay Up Late - on the creation of the Internet

The Soul of a New Machine - On computing in the 70's and 80's

The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison - On the rise of Oracle (also has the best title)

Masters of Doom - A history of id Software

What The Dormouse Said - How the 60's counterculture influenced computing

The New New Thing - Follows Jim Clark around while he creates SGI, Netscape, etc...

Check out Computer Wars by Ferguson for probably a better version of that.

The Ferguson book sent me down a lot of historical rabbit holes that didn't have wikipedia pages yet and I had to pull up things on like newspapers.com or archive.org to find out more information.

No shade on Cringley though, it's a fine book.

I can second Where Wizards Stay Up Late, I enjoyed it.

I just finished The Innovators by Walter Isaacson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_(book)), definitely more on the pop side of things but found it interesting and introduced me to people and topics I was able to research further on my own.

Wow, "History of Technology" is a very wide subject...

Are you interested in early computers? The first portable watches in the 18th century? How textiles were painted in antiquity?

The main international organizations on this front are ICOHTEC https://www.icohtec.org/ in Europe and SHOT https://www.historyoftechnology.org/ in the US. They have regular conferences, multi-track multi-day events, which attract many presenters and participants. Papers appear in Technology and Culture (published by SHOT); ICOHTEC also publishes ICON.

Besides these two large, international groups, there are national groups in many countries. And even more groups for specific areas of History of Technology, in either chronological or thematic focus.

I liked this one about how the increasing precision in manufacture enabled the adoption of new technologies

https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionists-Precision-Engineers-Cr...

I came here to second this book by Simon Winchester, "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World". Winchester has written may attention-worthy books.

I recommend listening to/ reading Alan Kay's works, especially for a idiosyncratic history of computing. You don't get many facts as is, but sophisticated interpretations of various disciplines, how to combine them, with a strong focus on history of technology (and other important ideas).

Medieval Technology and Social Change - Medieval Technology and Social Change https://a.co/d/8RuGXQM

Not a book, but the old Connections series is really wonderful for broad overviews along a narrow band. I wish there were more things that took a similar approach - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...

“The Idea Factory” Bell Labs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory

Here's a few going back 270 years with a focus on electricity, enjoy.

* Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries A Study of Early Modern Physics (1979) https://archive.org/details/electricityin17t0000heil

* Early electrical communication (1964) https://archive.org/details/earlyelectricalc0000marl

* Bibliographical history Of Electricity And Magnetism (1922) https://archive.org/details/bibliographicalh033138mbp/page/n...

^ This is still one of the best.

* Electric Science Its History, Phenomena, and Applications (1853) https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Lks1AAAAMAAJ

* The History and Present State of Electricity (1769) https://archive.org/details/historyandprese00priegoog

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ has a lot of blogposts that go over low-tech solutions to problems that were otherwise lost to history. For example, solar panels in the 1910s, early industry that used rope to transport power over several kilometers, the original peat-powered industrial revolutions, etc. Extremely fascinating stuff that most history books I've seen tend to miss out on. And they've compiled their posts into books you can buy

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/offline-reading/

https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Kris+De+Decker&page=...

1. The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger

2. The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur

3. (Not a book but documentary) Connections by James Burk

4. Books by James Burk [0]

[0]: https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/james--burke/215445/

In no order in particular, these are good books:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/722412.The_Dream_Machine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12625589-turing-s-cathed...

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27198205M/Fire_in_the_valley

"Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe" is the best I've read.

https://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Uni...

I found Herbert Hoover's translation of De Re Metallica[1] to be fascinating. A compendium of the technology of the day for processing most metals.

I also found Longitude[2]: "The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" to be an interesting account of the solving of the problem of nautical timekeeping.

I second the nomination of Simon Winchester's book "The Perfectionists"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

"Technopoly" by Neil Postman focusses on how technologies influence cultures. Postman taught at NYU for decades. He was not anti-technology - he said we need technology like we need food - but he was critical. He believed we should be careful about the technologies we adopt and how we use them. "Technopoly" looks at the history of technology over thousands of years. It describes how societies can become monopolized by technology. It was published in 1992 but feels even more relevant today.

Interesting fact: he wrote the book with pen and paper, without the help of a computer. He felt his writing was better that way. (Actually he wrote at least 20 books that way.)

Obviously computer-centered, but I strongly recommend "The Computing Universe" by Tony Hey and Gyuri Pápay.

While obviously touching Alan Turing's contribution, it doesn't just call it at day, but goes in detail on the history of networking, of memory, of the web, of "personal computers" companies, with tons of little asides on specific contributors, or projects.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/computing-universe/2542...

Not sure if this is what you're interested in, but a friend recently recommended reading these two in tandem:

"The Image" by David Boorstin, and "Palo Alto" by Malcom Harris

Both offer views on the evolution of technology, but from authors with somewhat opposing viewpoints.

"The Image" is particularly interesting to read today, because it was written in 1962, with the advent of TV, and back then one of the core concerns was edited video and how it was becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate fact from fiction.

Interesting overlap with some of the concerns around LLMs

To add some that haven't already been listed here:

- The Billion Dollar Molecule: story of Vertex pharmaceuticals and their new approach to drug design

- The Double Helix: story of the discovery of the structure of DNA by one of the principal scientists involved (Watson)

More of a business/economic history but if you liked Titan by Chernow you would probably also like "Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America" which is the about the history of the railroad industry in America.

Probably the most personally influential history of technology book I've read is Paul Rabinow's "Making PCR." It deals with issues around the path dependence of technology and how new technologies often arise from repurposing existing technologies.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo361492...

Lots of options out there. A few from my bookshelf: Bijker's "Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs" is a case-study-centric work that seeks to build a general theory of STS. Nye's "Technology Matters" is less a work of theory than a critique that poses core questions about how society should seek to integrate technical advances. Latour's "Science in Action," "Reassembling the Social," and "Aramis" are great examples of his approach to whole-of-system analysis of sociotechnical systems. Rogers' "Diffusion of Innovation" is a classic work theorizing how innovation is communicated through social networks.

MIT Press has a wide variety of books that cover specific topics in history, most of which have great theoretic interest: Agar's "The Government Machine," dealing with the evolution of technology and expertise within the UK government; Medina's "Cybernetic Revolutionaries," about Beer's Cybersyn project; and Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over," about the cultural development of the "programmer," are all great reads.

Also, you can look beyond pure technology for interesting adjacencies: for example, Schatz's "The Genius of the System" describes how changes in technology and management production radically upended Hollywood, resulting in the studio system that dominated from the 1930s through the 1950s, while Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution" picks up the pieces at the end of that system, discussing the rise of "New Hollywood," driven by cultural and technical (particularly the French use of inexpensive filming technologies to create the New Wave) forces.

Not really about history of technology as a whole but the book Computing in the Middle Ages was really fascinating. Made me realize that lots of the challenges software engineers face are much older than we assume.

https://www.amazon.com/Computing-Middle-Ages-Trenches-1955-1...

Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science

Each paper is often over my head. There is an introduction to each that helps explain the paper and its context. A great journey through time.

https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp...

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Weaves fascinating history of personal computing and internet through J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider biography.

Domestication of animals is a technology. Richard Bulliet is a historian who deals with a number of topics from a technological perspective, including human-animal relations.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/hunters-herders-and-hamburgers/...

Not sure if this is helpful, but a friend fed this conversation through ChatGPT and had it summarize for easier reading:

-The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy -Bigger by Marc Levinson

-The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos

-Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World by Erik Larson

-Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard -White

-The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War by William Manchester

-Edison by Edmund Morris

-Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

-The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

-Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

-The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

-The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

-Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael S. Malone

-The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

-The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

-Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White Jr.

-The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

-Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics by Eric H. Chaney

-Early Electrical Communication by A. F. Marland

-Bibliographical History of Electricity and Magnetism by Silvanus P. Thompson

-Electric Science: Its History, Phenomena, and Applications by J. J. Fahie

-The History and Present State of Electricity by Andrew Ure

-https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

-De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola

I don't think you are interested in this but if you have a few dolars to spare and you are interested on the basics of cybersecurity (or gift it to a junior engineer) I published this recently: https://medium.com/@oandreasc/cybersecurity-101-fundamentals... I do not consider myself an author but I believe it is a helpful guide.

Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I enjoy the authors youtube content (The Engineering Guy): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75598048-the-things-we-m...

"The Lightning Tamers", by Kathy Joseph, is a wonderful and accessible book about the history of electricity. Her youtube channel is great too: https://www.youtube.com/c/KathyLovesPhysicsHistory

New Thinking, it written by a youtuber, Dagogo Altraide, he has an amazing YouTube channel named Coldfusion. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39283582

The Code Book – Simon Singh (1999)

It’s not about technology in general but encryption only, but it covers its history pretty well.

The history of technology is something that's better covered in trade publications, magazines and biographies, rather than textbooks and academic journals. Here's what I'd recommend:

- Losing the Signal (Blackberry, 1990s-2013)

- Founders at Work (dotcom era)

- Masters of Doom ('90s PC video game market/graphics)

The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution

the story of Alfred Loomis, who was key in radar development:

Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

Not exactly "History" of technology, but there are sometimes various generations of components. Also the book is just amazing

https://nostarch.com/open-circuits

Would a history of science interest you? I enjoyed "The Scientists" by John Gribbin so much I've read it twice.

https://a.co/d/epMV64I

Darwin Among the Machines tells the story of humankind's journey into the digital wilderness. Introducing a cast of familiar and not-so-familiar characters, historian of science George B. Dyson

Interweaving tales of ancient inventors, unsung technological advancements, and future predictions, "Darwin Among the Machines" offers an enlightening exploration of the intricate relationship between human evolution and technology.

With an engaging narrative and insightful commentary, "Darwin Among the Machines" is a must-read for those intrigued by technology, history, and philosophy. The book challenges the boundaries of our understanding of life, evolution, and our technological future.

I really enjoyed reading: UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian W Kernighan

Any suggestions about the history of navigation? I have always been amazed by caravels and ~1500 advances on ships and navigation technology, but never dived into the subject.

It's more philosophical but Mumford's Technics and Civilization is really good, you should at least read the part about the invention of the clock that serves as the prototype for the relation between man and important technology. I'm also writing a book on philosophy of technology, so if you are interested in that I can give you some more resources ...

Definitely not serious, but super fun: "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself - Daniel J. Boorstin

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom - Matt Ridley

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation - Carl Benedikt Frey

Really enjoyed this read!

https://www.amazon.com/How-Internet-Happened-Netscape-iPhone...

I find this site to be quite extensive : https://computingthehumanexperience.com/books/

“America By Design” and “Forces of Production” by the historian David Noble[1] discuss the relationship between capitalism, management, and the development of technology.

From Wikipedia,

> “America by Design”…was published to unusually prominent reviews. Robert Heilbroner hailed it as a work that "makes us see technology as a force that shapes management in an industrial capitalist society.”

> “Forces of Production”…recounts the history of machine tool automation in the United States. [Noble] argues that CNC (computerized numerical control) machines were introduced both to increase efficiency and to discipline unions…[and] argues that management wanted to take the programming of machine tools…out of the hands of union members and transfer their control, by means of primitive programming, to non-union, college-educated white-collar employees working physically separate from the shop floor.

- [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_F._Noble

I very much liked Information by a James Gleick, but it’s rather pop

+1 for The Dream Machine about the rise of the personal computer. You may think you know the basic history but this really makes the pieces snap together.

Vaclav Smil: Energy and Civilization - A History

I really like Steve Blank’s Secret History of Silicon Valley. You van find it via Google.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Henry Smith Williams.

Capital volumes 1&2

I will recommend writers, not books.

Bruno Jacomy

Lewis Mumford

André Leroi-Gourhan

Marcel Mauss

Yrgö Engeström

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