"A history of seven small inventions that rocked the world"
In Nuts & Bolts, engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal sets out to boil down the complex modern world of engineering into just seven fundamental inventions - the nail, spring, wheel, pump, magnet, lens and string.
It's an historical, geographical and scientific journey across centuries, continents (also space) and the world of physics, which is entertaining as well as enlightening. We learn how human ingenuity has found ways to manipulate light, gas and solid objects in such a way that they can improve our world, and Agrawal is not short of examples of the ways in which this has happened.
Each of her seven chapters examines the evolution of a different invention - to begin with, the transition of the basic nail to become the nut & bolt in (for example) the industry of shipbuilding; or the pump, at one time a device to support early irrigation in arid lands which came to achieve great things in the worlds of heart surgery and space exploration. Often, it seems, the early versions of these devices were popping up independently and coincidentally around the world to solve universal challenges, but as time has gone by it has been the individual genius of an inventor up against a specific niche problem that has led to a breakthrough.
By the end of the book, on the one hand I had come to realise how we take such simple but game-changing items for granted when at one time they would have seemed miraculous; and on the other hand I was reassured to discover that devices which for much of my life had seemed beyond understanding were actually basically simple in that they rely on the same basic physics.
The author concludes with the hope that the big win for the widespread demystification of technology, is that it may support the drive for sustainability through the fixing, repair or repurposing of much of what makes our lives tick. This is a great book for the kind of person who likes to take things to bits to see how they work - and an inspiring read for the young engineers out there who may one day apply these small things in their own moment of breakthrough brilliance.
| Primary Genre | Popular Science |
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