Inventing Modern : Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins

John H. Lienhard

ISBN 10: 0195189515 / ISBN 13: 9780195189513

Verlag: Oxford University Press, 2005

Beschreibung

nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscrapers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road--Burma Shave, Kerouac, and White Castles--lie driving forces that set this account of Modern apart. One force, says Lienhard, was a new concept of boyhood--the risk-taking, hands-on savage inventor. Driven by an admiration of recklessness, America developed its technological empire with stunning speed. Bringing the airplane to fruition in so short a time, for example, were people such asKatherine Stinson, Lincoln Beachey, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh. The rediscovery of mystery powerfully drove Modern as well. X-Rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory had followed electricity and radium. Here we read how, with reality seemingly altered, hope seemed limitless. Lienhard blends these forces with his childhood in the brave new world. The result is perceptive, engaging, and filled with surprise. Whether he talks about Alexander Calder (an engineer whose sculptures were exercises in materials science) or that wacky paean to flight, Flying Down to Rio, unexpected detail emerges from every tile of this large mosaic. Inventing Modern is a personal book that displays, rather than defines, an age that ended before most of us were born. It is an engineer's homage to a time before the bomb and our terrible loss of confidence--a time that might yet rise again out of its own postmodern ashes.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 9780195189513

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Inventing Modern : Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 0195189515
• ISBN-13: 9780195189513
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Zustand: Neu
• Abmessungen: 234B x 156 H x 17 T Millimeter Breite: 234 mm, Höhe: 156 mm, Tiefe: 17 mm
• Gewicht: 471 Gramm

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

Now in paperback--A celebration of the inventive energy that made early 20th-century America modern

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John H. Lienhard is the M.D. Anderson Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston. He has worked as an engineer and educator since 1951, and is well known in thermal engineering. He has also written about, and taught, history since the 1970s. He is the author and host of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a weekday radio essay on the history of creativity and invention (heard on many public radio stations), and he is author of the book by the same name.