Countless inventions, large and small, have played defining roles in human history. But when editor Jack Challoner began to compile a list of these innovations, he wondered if 1,001 might be too many. He quickly realized the number was far too small.
The items that made Challoner’s list form a fascinating collection. People use many of them every day yet often take them for granted. Written by a team of more than 50 historians, designers, scientists and anthropologists, the entries in this book tell the stories behind the inventions, from stone tools —appearing about 2.6 million years ago — to the Large Hadron Collider, an atom-smashing particle accelerator that switched on last September.
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