Weird thread title, but here’s what I’m looking for: I want a good, readable, and engaging nonfiction book that basically explains to me how we got from stagecoaches and log cabins to space travel and the internet in about 100 years. I’d like it to specifically detail the major technological developments that shaped and propelled this period of progress (electricity, the development of vacuum tubes, then transistors, then IC’s and microprocessors, etc.), and I want it to tell those stories and explain what spurred on those discoveries and developments. I want to learn about the people that made those breakthroughs, and how and why they were able to make them. While I don’t necessarily want it to be a college-level engineering textbook, I’d like it to go reasonably into depth about the hows and whys of those breakthroughs (“What the hell DOES a transistor actually do, and why was it so revolutionary compared to vacuum tubes?”).
This is a tough one. You’re asking for an awful lot to be put into the covers of one book, and I can’t think of any single book that satisfies all your needs.
There are plenty of books with titles like A Century of Technology or some such. They’re oversized, almost coffee table, books that have lots of illustrations and devote a page or three to every major advance. I don’t know how deeply they can go into the stories and people, though.
Science: a history of discovery in the twentieth century [edited by] Trevor I. Williams.
Inventing the modern world: technology since 1750 / Robert Bud
Scientific American inventions and discoveries: all the milestones in ingenuity–from the discovery of fire to the invention of the microwave oven / Rodney Carlisle.
A science odyssey: 100 years of discovery / Charles Flowers
You can browse the shelves at a Barnes & Noble or Borders to find them. Most libraries also carry them.
Here’s one that’s more of a narrative history, just out so I haven’t seen it: The shock of the old: technology and global history since 1900 / David Edgerton.
The best books that I think do exactly what you want are part of the Sloan Technology Series. Enter the term into Amazon and you’ll have a long list of books that each tackle a specific aspect of modern technology. Those I’ve read have been first-rate.
It’s not a narrative history per se. Rather Edgerton is making an argument about the types of narratives we tell about the history of technology. In particular, that the likes of the traditional Great Inventors Changing the World stories, or even the more sophisticated versions thereof, are a distorted version of the everyday realities of technology in the 20th century. He uses plenty of, sometimes quite detailed, examples to undermine the usual narrative, but the book is deliberately not comprehensive and it largely assumes a familiarity with the older types of histories and the cases they cover. While much of what he says can be taken as pointers towards the narrative histories he thinks ought to be written about the subject, he’s not written such a book.
Edgerton is thus not only not an example of what the OP is looking for, he’s actually mounting a broad attack on that whole genre. Even though I disagree with an awful lot of his argument, it’s an astonishingly thought provoking and original book.
