Masterworks of Technology
The Story of Creative Engineering, Architecture, and Design
Written by E. E. Lewis

Format: Hardcover, 328 pages
On Sale: September 1, 2004
Price: $29.99

In this absorbing exploration of technological creativity throughout the ages, E. E. Lewis, professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, eloquently tells the story of how science and engineering—which had little in common until a few hundred years ago—came together to create the technological world of the 21st century.

Today’s technology is... Read more >

The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright

Edited by Peter Jakab and Rick Young

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
On Sale: June 17, 2004
Price: $22.95

For the first time, nearly seventy of Wilbur and Orville Wright's published writings are brought together in a single, annotated reference. Spanning the decades from the brothers' turn-of-the-century experiments with gliders until Orville's death in 1948, the articles describe the design of their aircraft, early test flights, and camp life at... Read more >

Our Own Devices
How Technology Remakes Humanity
Written by Edward Tenner

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $18.00

This delightful and instructive history of invention shows why National Public Radio dubbed Tenner “the philosopher of everyday technology.” Looking at how our inventions have impacted our world in ways we never intended or imagined, he shows that the things we create have a tendency to bounce back and change us.

The... Read more >

Masters of Doom
How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
Written by David Kushner

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $15.95

Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes... Read more >

Parting the Desert
The Creation of the Suez Canal
Written by Zachary Karabell

Format: Trade Paperback, 328 pages
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $18.00

Award-winning historian Zachary Karabell tells the epic story of the greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century--the building of the Suez Canal-- and shows how it changed the world.

The dream was a waterway that would unite the East and the West, and the ambitious, energetic French diplomat and entrepreneur Ferdinand de... Read more >

Old Stationary Engines

Written by D.W. Edgington

Format: Trade Paperback, 56 pages
On Sale: April 1, 2004
Price: $12.95

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The Radioactive Boy Scout
The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor
Written by Ken Silverstein

Format: eBook
On Sale: March 2, 2004
Price: $11.99

Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science, and his basement experiments—building homemade fireworks, brewing moonshine, and concocting his own self-tanning lotion—were more ambitious than those of other boys. While working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David’s obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing... Read more >

The Mystery of Flight 427
Inside a Crash Investigation
Written by Bill Adair

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
On Sale: January 17, 2004
Price: $16.95

The immediate human toll of the 1994 Flight 427 disaster was staggering: all 132 people aboard died on a Pennsylvania hillside. The subsequent investigation was a maze of politics, bizarre theories, and shrouded answers. Bill Adair, an award-winning journalist, was granted special access to the five-year inquiry by the National Transportation... Read more >

Tomorrow Now
Envisioning the Next 50 Years
Written by Bruce Sterling

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
On Sale: December 23, 2003
Price: $16.00

“Nobody knows better than Bruce Sterling how thin the membrane between science fiction and real life has become, a state he correctly depicts as both thrilling and terrifying in this frisky, literate, clear-eyed sketch of the next half-century. Like all of the most interesting futurists, Sterling isn’t just talking about machines... Read more >

Executioner's Current
Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair
Written by Richard Moran

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
On Sale: November 11, 2003
Price: $15.00

In this amazing story of high stakes competition between two titans, Richard Moran shows how the electric chair developed not out of the desire to be more humane but through an effort by one nineteenth-century electric company to discredit the other.

In 1882, Thomas Edison ushered in the “age of electricity”... Read more >

The Cotton Industry

Written by Chris Aspin

Format: Trade Paperback, 32 pages
On Sale: November 1, 2003
Price: $11.95

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Air Vagabonds
Oceans, Airmen, and a Quest for Adventure
Written by Anthony J. Vallone

Format: Hardcover, 312 pages
On Sale: October 17, 2003
Price: $29.95

Air Vagabonds is the story of the amazing, true (mis)adventures of a band of rogues piloting aircraft alone into exotic and deadly destinations.

In the late 1970s and through the 1980s the demand for light aircraft eclipsed anything seen before or since. This created the need for a small air force of... Read more >

Magnificent Failure
Free Fall from the Edge of Space
Written by Craig Ryan

Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
On Sale: October 17, 2003
Price: $29.95

Locked in a desperate Cold War race against the Soviets to find out if humans could survive in space and live through a free fall from space vehicles, the Pentagon gave civilian adventurer Nick Piantanida’s Project Strato-Jump little notice until May Day, 1966. Operating in the shadows of well-funded, high-visibility Air... Read more >

Biowarrior
Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine
Written by Igor V. Domaradskij

Format: Hardcover, 250 pages
On Sale: October 1, 2003
Price: $30.99

This extraordinary memoir by a leading Russian scientist who worked for decades at the nerve center of the top-secret "Biopreparat" offers a chilling look into the biological weapons program of the former Soviet Union, vestiges of which still exist today in the Russian Federal Republic. Igor Domaradskij calls himself an "inconvenient... Read more >

Buffalo Soldiers
The Colored Regulars in the United States Army
Written by T. G. Steward

Format: Trade Paperback, 370 pages
On Sale: September 1, 2003
Price: $19.99

African American soldiers distinguished themselves for valor during the Civil War and their service in defense of the Union went a long way toward securing the civil rights of all black Americans after the war. On the frontier, African American units of the U.S. Army (nicknamed "buffalo soldiers" by their Indian... Read more >

The Hunt for Zero Point
Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology
Written by Nick Cook

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
On Sale: August 12, 2003
Price: $16.00

This riveting work of investigative reporting and history exposes classified government projects to build gravity-defying aircraft--which have an uncanny resemblance to flying saucers.

The atomic bomb was not the only project to occupy government scientists in the 1940s. Antigravity technology, originally spearheaded by scientists in Nazi Germany, was another high priority, one... Read more >

What Just Happened
A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
Written by James Gleick

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
On Sale: June 10, 2003
Price: $13.00

For the past decade change seemed to happen over night, every night. Fueled by the exponential rise of technology, the digital revolution was difficult for many to make sense of, but James Gleick watched and analyzed, criticized and commended, participated in and prophesized about the instantaneous transformations of the world as... Read more >