From Insight to Innovation

- Blurb -

Technology is essential to modern life, yet few of us are technology-literate enough to know much about the engineering that underpins it. In this book, David P. Billington, Jr. , offers accessible accounts of the key twentieth-century engineering innovations that brought us into the twenty-first century. Billington examines a series of engineering advances-from Hoover Dam and jet engines to the transistor, the microchip, the computer, and the internet-and explains how they came about and how they work. Each of these innovations tells a unique story. The great dams of the New Deal brought huge rivers under control, and a national highway system interconnected the nation, as did jet air travel. The transistor and the microchip originated in the private sector and found a mass market after early government support. The computer and the internet began as government projects and found a mass market later in the private sector. Billington finds that engineers with unconventional insights could succeed in a bureaucratic age; what mattered were independent vision and a society that welcomed innovation. This book completes the story of American engineering begun with the earlier volumes The Innovators (by the author' s father) and Power, Speed, and Form (by the author and his father).