Download or read book The Inventor and the Tycoon written by Edward Ball and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.
Download or read book The People s Tycoon written by Steven Watts and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-03-04 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.
Download or read book Tuxedo Park written by Jennet Conant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller! The untold story of the eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses who helped build the atomic bomb and defeat the Nazis—changing the course of history. Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century—Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others—at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, in the late 1930s. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, one of the leading scientific advisers of World War II, enjoyed unprecedented access to Loomis’ papers, as well as to people intimately involved in his life and work. She pierces through Loomis’ obsessive secrecy and illuminates his role in assuring the Allied victory.
Download or read book War of the Currents written by Stephanie Sammartino McPherson and published by Twenty-First Century Books. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1880s, only a few wealthy people had electric lighting in their homes. Everyone else had use more dangerous lighting, such as gas lamps. Eager companies wanted to be the first to supply electricity to more Americans. The early providers would set the standards—and reap great profits. Inventor Thomas Edison already had a leading role in the industry: he had invented the first reliable electrical lightbulb. By 1882 his Edison Electric Light Company was distributing electricity using a system called direct current, or DC. But an inventor named Nikola Tesla challenged Edison. Tesla believed that an alternating current—or AC—system would be better. With an AC system, one power station could deliver electricity across many miles, compared to only about one mile for DC. Each inventor had his backers. Business tycoon George Westinghouse put his money behind Tesla and built AC power stations. Meanwhile, Edison and his DC backers said that AC could easily electrocute people. Edison believed this risk would sway public opinion toward DC power. The battle over which system would become standard became known as the War of the Currents. This exciting book tells the story of that war, the people who fought it, and the ways in which both kinds of electric power changed the world.
Download or read book Slaves in the Family written by Edward Ball and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades after this celebrated work of narrative nonfiction won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, Slaves in the Family is reissued by FSG Classics, with a new preface by the author. The Ball family hails from South Carolina—Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word ‘family.'"
Download or read book The Alchemy of Air written by Thomas Hager and published by Crown. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the Haber-Bosch discovery that changed billions of lives—including your own. At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster: Mass starvation was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’ s scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two men who found it: brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, and saved millions of lives. But their epochal triumph came at a price we are still paying. The Haber-Bosch process was also used to make the gunpowder and explosives that killed millions during the two world wars. Both men were vilified during their lives; both, disillusioned and disgraced, died tragically. The Alchemy of Air is the extraordinary, previously untold story of a discovery that changed the way we grow food and the way we make war–and that promises to continue shaping our lives in fundamental and dramatic ways.
Download or read book Insull written by Forrest McDonald and published by Beard Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reprint of a previosly published work. It dewals with Samuel Insull, who was Thomas Edison's private secretary and founded the business of centralized electric supply. He organized the Edison General Electric Company.
Download or read book The Genetic Strand written by Edward Ball and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-06 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Genetic Strand is the story of a writer's investigation, using DNA science, into the tale of his family's origins. National Book Award winner Edward Ball has turned his probing gaze on the microcosm of the human genome, and not just any human genome -- that of his slave-holding ancestors. What is the legacy of such a family history, and can DNA say something about it? In 2000, after a decade in New York City, Ball bought a house in Charleston, South Carolina, home to his father's family for generations, and furnished it with heirloom pieces from his relatives. In one old desk he was startled to discover a secret drawer, sealed perhaps since the Civil War, in which someone had hidden a trove of family hair, with each lock of hair labeled and dated. The strange find propelled him to investigate: what might DNA science reveal about the people -- Ball's family members, long dead -- to whom the hair had belonged? Did the hair come from white relatives, as family tradition insisted? How can genetic tests explain personal identity? Part crime-scene investigation, part genealogical romp, The Genetic Strand is a personal odyssey into DNA and family history. The story takes the reader into forensics labs where technicians screen remains, using genetics breakthroughs like DNA fingerprinting, and into rooms where fathers nervously await paternity test results. It also summons the writer¹s entertaining and idiosyncratic family, such as Ball¹s antebellum predecessor, Aunt Betsy, who published nutty books on good Southern society; Kate Fuller, the enigmatic ancestor who may have introduced African genes into the Ball family pool; and the author¹s first cousin Catherine, very much alive, who donates a cheek swab from a mouth more attuned to sweet iced tea than DNA sampling. Writing gracefully but pacing his story like an old-fashioned whodunit, Edward Ball tracks genes shared across generations, adding suspense and personal meaning to what the scientists and Nobel laureates tell us. A beguiling DNA tale, The Genetic Strand reaches toward a new form of writing the genetic memoir.
Download or read book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate written by Anthony Lewis and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America’s culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.InFreedom for the Thought That We Hate, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas—political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America’s great founding ideas.
Download or read book The Ramen King and I written by Andy Raskin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mankind is Noodlekind" For three days in January 2007,the most e-mailed article in The New York Times was "appreciations: Mr. noodle," an editorial noting the passing, at age ninety-six, of Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen. Ando's existence came as a shock to many, but not to Andy Raskin, who had spent three years trying to meet the noodle pioneer. The Ramen King and I is Raskin's funny and, at times, painfully honest memoir about confronting the truth of his dating life-with Ando as his spiritual guide. Can instant ramen lead one to a committed relationship? And is sushi the secret to self-acceptance? A true tale of hunger in its many forms, The Ramen King and I is about becoming slaves to our desires and learning to break free.
Download or read book The Last Lone Inventor written by Evan I. Schwartz and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “...Fascinating... A riveting American classic of independent brilliance versus corporate arrogance. I found it more fun than fiction.” — James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers “... The fascinating inside story of how this eccentric loner invented television and fought corporate America.” — Walter Isaacson, chariman, CNN “...Compelling...Strong, dramatic prose...” — Kirkus Reviews “...A lively and engaging account.” — Library Journal “[A] gripping and eminently readable saga of the birth of television and the death of the Edisonian myth.” — Darwin magazine
Download or read book Peninsula of Lies written by Edward Ball and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peninsula of Lies is a nonfiction mystery, set in haunting locales and peopled with fascinating characters, that unwraps the enigma of a woman named Dawn Langley Simmons, a British writer who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1960s and became the focus of one of the most unusual sexual scandals of the last century. Born in England sometime before World War II, Dawn Langley Simmons began life as a boy named Gordon Langley Hall. Gordon was the son of servants at Sissinghurst Castle, the estate of Vita Sackville-West, where as a child he met Vita's lover Virginia Woolf. In his twenties, Gordon made his way to New York, where he became an author of society biographies and befriended such grandes dames as the actress Margaret Rutherford and the artist and heiress Isabel Whitney, who left him a small fortune. The money allowed Gordon to buy a mansion in Charleston and fill it with period furniture, providing a stage for him to entertain more great ladies and to climb the social ladder of the Southern gentry to its heights. However, Gordon's world changed instantly in 1968, when at The Johns Hopkins Hospital he underwent one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries, returning to Southern society and scandalizing Charleston as the new Dawn Langley Hall. Dawn Hall furthermore announced that her surgery had been corrective, because she'd actually been misidentified as a boy at birth. Three months later, Dawn raised the stakes in still-segregated Charleston when she arranged her very public marriage to a young black mechanic, John-Paul Simmons. In due course, Dawn appeared around town pregnant; finally, she could be seen pushing a baby carriage with a child -- her daughter, Natasha. National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball (Slaves in the Family) has written a detective story that deciphers the riddle of Dawn Simmons, a once rich and infamous changeling who died in 2000, her sexual identity never determined. Peninsula of Lies is an engrossing narrative of a person who tested every taboo, as well as the confidence of observers in their own eyes.
Download or read book A Man of Misconceptions written by John Glassie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Scientific American Best Science Book of 2012 An Atlantic Wire Best Book of 2012 A New York Times Book Review “Editor's Choice” The “fascinating” (The New Yorker) story of Athanasius Kircher, the eccentric scholar-inventor who was either a great genius or a crackpot . . . or a bit of both. The interests of Athanasius Kircher, the legendary seventeenth-century priest-scientist, knew no bounds. From optics to music to magnetism to medicine, he offered up inventions and theories for everything, and they made him famous across Europe. His celebrated museum in Rome featured magic lanterns, speaking statues, the tail of a mermaid, and a brick from the Tower of Babel. Holy Roman Emperors were his patrons, popes were his friends, and in his spare time he collaborated with the Baroque master Bernini. But Kircher lived during an era of radical transformation, in which the old approach to knowledge—what he called the “art of knowing”— was giving way to the scientific method and modern thought. A Man of Misconceptions traces the rise, success, and eventual fall of this fascinating character as he attempted to come to terms with a changing world. With humor and insight, John Glassie returns Kircher to his rightful place as one of history’s most unforgettable figures.
Download or read book Geronimo written by Robert M. Utley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “meticulous and finely researched” biography tracks the Apache raider’s life from infamous renegade to permanent prisoner of war (Publishers Weekly). Notorious for his ferocity in battle and uncanny ability to elude capture, the Apache fighter Geronimo became a legend in his own time and remains an iconic figure of the nineteenth century American West. In Geronimo, renowned historian Robert M. Utley digs beneath the myths and rumors to produce an authentic and thoroughly researched portrait of the man whose unique talents and human shortcomings swept him into the fierce storms of history. Utley draws on an array of newly available sources, including firsthand accounts and military reports, as well as his geographical expertise and deep knowledge of the conflicts between whites and Native Americans. This highly accurate and vivid narrative unfolds through the alternating perspectives of whites and Apaches, arriving at a more nuanced understanding of Geronimo’s character and motivation than ever before. What was it like to be an Apache fighter-in-training? Why was Geronimo feared by whites and Apaches alike? Why did he finally surrender after remaining free for so long? The answers to these and many other questions fill the pages of this authoritative volume.
Download or read book The Fast Times of Albert Champion written by Peter Nye and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first biography of the short but exciting life of Albert Champion-record-setting bicyclist and motorcyclist, daredevil race car driver, early automobile innovator with thirty US patents, charismatic ladies' man, and celebrity of the Jazz Age. Though most Americans have heard of the two companies he founded-Champion Spark Plug and ACDelco-few know much about the flamboyant man behind the companies. The book's lively narrative describes the many adventures of the Frenchman who rose from poverty in Paris to great wealth and fame in both his native France and the United States. As a bicycle racer, Champion set more than a hundred world records. When the urban speed limit was 8 mph, he was the first ever to drive a motorcycle a mile under a minute. Then a car-racing crash in Brooklyn snapped a leg bone that kept him in traction for eleven weeks. Handicapped but undeterred, he hobbled out of the hospital on crutches and recovered to win the French national cycling championship. He subsequently invested his prize money to become a tycoon in the American auto industry, working closely with the leading players in this new revolutionary industry. Good looking and a natty dresser, he was an incorrigible ladies' man, whose many dalliances finally ended in a love triangle that resulted in his death under mysterious circumstances.
Download or read book Thomas Edison written by Hourly History and published by Hourly History. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Edison passed on many decades ago, but his inventions still echo loudly through time. If you watch TV, listen to your favorite songs, or simply click on the lamp next to your bed, it was Thomas Edison who brought all of these innovations into the world. Inside you will read about... ✓ Edison's Early Life ✓ The Electric Light ✓ The War of the Currents ✓ Other Inventions and Projects ✓ Final Years and Death ✓ Edison's Legacy And much more! Edison is sometimes regarded as someone who loved arguing with other inventors who were going in different directions from him, yet his tenacity and dedication to his own work were what made so many of his inventions workable. No matter which way you look at Edison, from failed businessman, renowned inventor, distant father to his children, or to an argumentative scientist, there is one thing everyone can agree on; Thomas Edison was pure genius. After all, in his world, nothing less would do.
Download or read book Franklin Flyer written by Nicholas Christopher and published by Delta. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this shimmering work of fiction, Nicholas Christopher follows the remarkable life of Franklin Flyer–a restless young inventor named after the train on which he was born–through the tumultuous years of the Great Depression, into the Second World War. Raised by his suffragette aunt, at various times a vagabond and tycoon, Franklin travels across the U.S.A and around the globe, seeking adventure and enlightenment, charting his fate by pursuing the unexpected. He encounters a glittering cast of characters: among them Rita Hayworth, Josephine Baker, OSS founder “Wild Bill” Donovan, and a host of political zealots, opportunists, and dreamers thrown together in a world on the brink of collapse. With each new invention–devices that help to revolutionize everything from early television to the technology with which the Allies respond to the Axis powers–Franklin makes his mark. Gaining fame and fortune, he also suffers terrible heartbreak, and through numerous transformations discovers that a man’s own life is truly his most difficult, and rewarding, invention. A brisk, vivid blend of history and imagination, Franklin Flyer brings to life an American hero as unforgettable as his times.
