The Origins of Invention
Author: Otis Tufton Mason
Publisher:
Published: 1896
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13:
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Author: Otis Tufton Mason
Publisher:
Published: 1896
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Silvia Ferrara
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2022-03-01
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 0374601631
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.
Author: James S. Ackerman
Publisher:
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780300218718
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn illuminating collection of essays from the preeminent scholar of architectural history and theory One of the most distinguished scholars in the fields of architectural history and theory today, James Sloss Ackerman is best known for his work on Italian masters such as Palladio and Michelangelo. In this collection of essays, Ackerman offers insight into his formation and development as a scholar, as well as reflections on a range of topics. Concise, lucid, and original, this book presents deep syntheses alongside innovative approaches and a broadening geographical and chronological reach. Ackerman's enduring fascination with architecture was one unforeseen consequence of his military service in World War II, and the collection includes a revealing account of his part in the liberation of Milan as a soldier in the Fifth American Regiment. These essays represent a unique, personal journey--from the Italian Renaissance to the classical architecture of India and the work of Frank Gehry at the new museum of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
Author: Tamim Ansary
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-10-01
Total Pages: 456
ISBN-13: 1610397975
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.
Author: Jolyon Goddard
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 355
ISBN-13: 1426205449
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA global view of science and technology as it developed over the centuries.
Author: Siep Stuurman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-02-20
Total Pages: 429
ISBN-13: 0674977513
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present. Despite humans’ deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontier experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their “barbarians,” but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance. Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers—Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and more—The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizational frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa, to Europeans’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal “modern equality.” Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”
Author: Autumn Stanley
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 792
ISBN-13: 9780813521978
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStanley traces women's inventions in five vital areas of technology worldwide--agriculture, medicine, reproduction, machines, and computers.
Author: Eric Hobsbawm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1992-07-31
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780521437738
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores examples of this process of invention and addresses the complex interaction of past and present in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism.
Author: John Jewkes
Publisher: Springer
Published: 1969-06-18
Total Pages: 383
ISBN-13: 1349000159
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA study of the causes and consequences of industrial innovation through the inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Author: Stewart Ross
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books
Published: 2019-10-03
Total Pages: 178
ISBN-13: 1789290635
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA lively and highly readable account of human invention, innovation and discovery. The First of Everything recounts the origins, invention and discovery of just about everything on the planet, from the Big Bang to driverless cars.