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Book Summary and Reviews of The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen

The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen

The Most Powerful Idea in the World

A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

by William Rosen

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  • Published:
  • Jun 2010, 400 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

If all measures of human advancement in the last hundred centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost perfectly flat line—until the eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution would cause the line to shoot straight up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress.

In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it - the steam engine. In the process he tackles the question that has obsessed historians ever since: What made eighteenth-century Britain such fertile soil for inventors? Rosen’s answer focuses on a simple notion that had become enshrined in British law the century before: that people had the right to own and profit from their ideas.

The result was a period of frantic innovation revolving particularly around the promise of steam power. Rosen traces the steam engine’s history from its early days as a clumsy but sturdy machine, to its coming-of-age driving the wheels of mills and factories, to its maturity as a transporter for people and freight by rail and by sea. Along the way we enter the minds of such inventors as Thomas Newcomen and James Watt, scientists including Robert Boyle and Joseph Black, and philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith - all of whose insights, tenacity, and ideas transformed first a nation and then the world.
 
William Rosen is a masterly storyteller with a keen eye for the 'aha!' moments of invention and a gift for clear and entertaining explanations of science. The Most Powerful Idea in the World will appeal to readers fascinated with history, science, and the hows and whys of innovation itself.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. The only flaw in Rosen's exhaustive survey is the lack of attention paid to female inventors. A staggering work of epistemological research." - Kirkus Reviews

"Patient readers will find thought-provoking this serious history of technological innovation and the veritable invention of our modern world." - Library Journal

This information about The Most Powerful Idea in the World was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

William Rosen

William Rosen, the author of the award-winning history Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, was an editor and publisher at Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and the Free Press for nearly twenty-five years. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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