For more than two centuries, E pluribus unum -- Out of many, one -- has been featured on America's official government seals and stamped on its currency. But how did America become "one nation, indivisible"? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? In this monumental history, Simon Winchester addresses these questions, bringing together the breathtaking achievements that helped forge and unify America...

The wheel was invented some 5,000 years ago, and the modern suitcase in the mid-nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the 1970s that someone successfully married the two. What was the hold up? For writer and journalist Katrine Marçal, the answer is both shocking and simple: because "real men" carried their bags, no matter how heavy. There were rolling suitcases before the '70s, but they were marketed as a niche product for (the presumably few)...

"Explores the brilliant and prescient mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists and inventors. Called a madman by his enemies, a genius by others, and an enigma by nearly everyone, Nikola Tesla was a trailblazing inventor who created astonishing, sometimes world-transforming devices that were virtually without theoretical precedent..." -- Cover.

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped national character. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia, to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became,...

Biography of one of the United States most famous statesman, inventor, printer and scientist.

Showing how tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations and smaller scale inventions with great potential, Foege argues that America still cultivates visionary innovators who do not allow cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity.

Tells the parallel stories of the skepticism and incredulity that accompanied Guglielmo Marconi's invention of wireless communication in the late nineteenth century, and the investigation of the murder of an inconvenient wife by her love-starved husband, Dr. H.H. Crippen, who would likely have pulled off the perfect crime had it not been for the ability to send wireless transatlantic transmissions.

He started his life out in the shadows of the steel mills in Gary Indiana. Instead of home or school being his safe places to learn and grow, Tom Pado found his own ways of learning. His friends and neighbors never really knew what to expect. Homemade rockets that blew up, brewing up a concoction on his mother's stove that he later learned was Mustard Gas, his pet zoo in and out of the house and an affable demeanor and broad smile that didn't seem...

Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, sold one of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age:...

While Leonardo is remembered primarily as an artist, his accomplishments as a scientist were at least as important; among other work, he studied the motion of water, worked out the trajectory of missiles, and designed impregnable fortifications, all with just a bare-bones knowledge of arithmetic. Klein insists that "the Mona Lisa so riveting because it incorporated many of the optical rules that Leonardo discovered," such as the way proportions change...