How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson
4.6 on Amazon
12 HN comments
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm
Lewis Dartnell
4.5 on Amazon
12 HN comments
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
R. Buckminster Fuller and Jaime Snyder
4.7 on Amazon
12 HN comments
The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (New York Review Books Classics)
Masanobu Fukuoka, Larry Korn, et al.
4.7 on Amazon
11 HN comments
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
Alex Epstein
4.8 on Amazon
11 HN comments
Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer
Thomas Seyfried
4.5 on Amazon
9 HN comments
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Simon Winchester and HarperAudio
4.6 on Amazon
8 HN comments
Rocket Propulsion Elements
George P. Sutton and Oscar Biblarz
4.7 on Amazon
7 HN comments
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Neil Sheehan
4.7 on Amazon
7 HN comments
The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
Ian Urbina, Jason Culp, et al.
4.5 on Amazon
7 HN comments
Flight: The Complete History of Aviation
R.G. Grant and Smithsonian Institution
4.8 on Amazon
6 HN comments
Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
Mark Miodownik
4.6 on Amazon
6 HN comments
Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How
Theodore John Kaczynski
4.7 on Amazon
6 HN comments
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Matt Ridley and HarperAudio
4.6 on Amazon
5 HN comments
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
David W. Anthony, Tom Perkins, et al.
4.5 on Amazon
5 HN comments
turing_completeonSep 15, 2020
cybert00thonFeb 19, 2021
Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, is right, governments are poor drivers of innovation - and this little 'distraction' is going to be another case to prove his point.
gnicholasonJune 25, 2020
Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, has talked about the possibility that there have been any notable innovations that ‘came too late’.
In particular, he talks about the wheeled suitcase, which at first glance seems to have come decades too late. But he ultimately concludes that the weight that would have been added by metal wheels and enclosures were unnecessary at previous times, when airports were much smaller. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any other candidates for technologies that came too late.
But I think that this the BeeLine technology could fit the bill.
albertoponDec 10, 2020
ljosifovonSep 15, 2020
Most innovations we all enjoy and cherish are a product of long chain of trial and error by different people at different times. Often the theory is understood poorly (if at all) at the time of the invention, and developed after. Luck plays a role in particular person X inventing Y at time Z. But given the number of other people (not-X) that come up with similar invention ~Y at similar time ~Z, looks like Y would have been invented by someone at about time Z.