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The first half of the 20th century was a silver age for inventors, exceeded only by the previous half-century. It introduced some of the most important technologies of the modern world: mass production, aircraft, and telecommunications among them.
From the Early 1900s to the Mid-1900s: Henry Ford to Walt Disney, History’s Most Influential Inventors, edited by Robert Curley, is part of a series of slim volumes with biographies of inventors. The series is divided chronologically.
This volume focuses on inventors who became prominent between roughly 1900 and 1950. It contains thirteen biographies starting with Ford and ending with Disney. Their achievements are spread among a broad spectrum of technology. Chemistry, industrial engineering, aviation, architecture, entertainment, and food preparation are represented.
The biographies in the book include Henry Ford (the assembly line and mass production), the Wright Brothers (aviation), and Guielmo Marconi (radio). Robert Goddard (rocketry), Clarence Birdseye (frozen food), Igor Sikorsky (helicopters), Vladimir Zworykin (television), Edwin H. Armstrong (FM radio), Buckminster Fuller (architecture), Paul Müller (pesticides), Ernest Lawrence (cyclotron and particle acceleration), and Walt Disney (animation).
All created some major innovations, significantly shaping modern society. It is hard to imagine a world without mass production, aircraft, remote telecommunications, and access to space. Movies, the geodesic dome, atomic energy, and frozen foods may seem more peripheral, yet they all changed the way we live.
The book offers a four to six-page biography of each man (or men for Wilbur and Orville Wright). It introduces their childhood and youth, including formative influences on their adult lives. It then presents their accomplishments, discussing how they developed the things for which they are known and the challenges overcome to get there. Finally, it gives the impact, for good or ill, of what they developed had on the world. It also makes an invention’s significance the deciding factor for inclusion, rather than inclusiveness. This is a brave choice today.
From the Early 1900s to the Mid-1900s is a short book, only 64 pages. As befits its publisher (Britannica) the biographies read like encyclopedia entries. In many ways they are extended encyclopedia articles, expanding into detail beyond what would be expected in one, but not providing as detailed an accounting as a book-length biography would provide. It serves the purpose for which it is intended. It provides an introduction to each inventor, leaving the reader to decide if they want to explore the man’s life further.
“From the Early 1900s to the Mid-1900s: Henry Ford to Walt Disney, History’s Most Influential Inventors,” edited by Robert Curley, Britannica Educational Pub, July 2024, 64 pages, $38.86 (Hardcover), $16.24 (paperback)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Discussion (10)
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What age/reading level is the book's target audience?
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I'm guessing adult, since Seawriter is writing about it.
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Adult, but what I would term newspaper level. If you did an analysis I suspect it would be compressible to someone with a traditional 20th century 6th-grade reading level. (Someone who attended 6th grade in 1950 or 1960 as opposed to attending 6th grade in 2024.)
That is not a knock on it. I try to write my books at 6th-grade level of comprehension. You should not be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to understand popular history. Like I said in the review, image a six to eight page Encyclopedia Britannica entry and you have it.
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This book is atypical of the books I normally review. It is short, and part of a series. I do like to experiment now and then. What impressed me most was the editor's unwillingness to compromise standards in the name of inclusiveness. All of the inventors are white, male and American or European. Yet the dozen chapters cover the most prominent inventors of the early 20th century, the ones with the greatest impact on society. I felt that time of courage merited recognition.
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We have an 11 year-old grandson who might be interested in it.
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