Catalog Search Results
6) Engineers
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In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America's Gilded Age-Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse-battled as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the...
12) Simply electrifying: the technology that transformed the world, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk
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Looks at the stories of the researchers, innovators, businesspeople, and regulators who shaped how electricity was understood and used, from early researchers like Benjamin Franklin to contemporary innovators like Elon Musk.
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"A chilling account of seventy years of nuclear catastrophes, by the author of the "definitive" (Economist) Cold War history, Nuclear Folly. Nuclear energy was embraced across the globe at the height of the nuclear industry in the 1960s and 1970s; today, there are 440 nuclear reactors operating throughout the world, with nuclear power providing 10 percent of world electricity. Yet as the world seeks to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change,...
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Sure, we all make mistakes, but when you're at the leading edge of human ingenuity and engineering ambition, one slip, one tiny error, can have almost unimaginable consequences. With over 14 hours of on-the-scene footage, powerful reenactments, expert analysis and graphic reconstructions, this fantastically popular show is the ultimate pre- and post-mortem on the most notorious engineering disasters of the past 40 years.
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Engineering is where human knowledge meets real-world problems - and solves them. It's the source of some of our greatest inventions, from the catapult to the jet engine. Marshall Brain, creator of the How Stuff Works series and a professor at the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NCSU, provides a detailed look at 250 milestones in the discipline. He covers the various areas, including chemical, aerospace, and computer engineering, from ancient...
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"Turn on the faucet, and water pours out. Pull out the drain plug, and the dirty water disappears. Most of us give little thought to the hidden systems that bring us water and take it away when we're done with it. But these underappreciated marvels of engineering face an array of challenges that cannot be solved without a fundamental change to our relationship with water, David Sedlak explains in this enlightening book. To make informed decisions...
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With enthusiasm and witty intelligence, Mahaffey unearths lost reactors on far-flung islands and finds trees that were exposed to active fission--which then changed gender or bloomed in the dead of winter. He explains why we have nuclear submarines but not nuclear aircraft and why cold fusion does not--and cannot--exist. And who knew that radiation-counting was once a fashionable trend? Though parts of our nuclear history might seem like fiction--such...
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"A survey of walls throughout history and their role in shaping society."--Provided by publisher.
From ancient times to the present, mankind has built barriers: against the elements, against predatory animals, against other humans. These edifices of mud, brick, and stone circle the globe. Frye examines the history of walls, and reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. He questions: Did walls make civilization possible?...