Book Review: How To Invent Everything

This is an entertaining, useful, and thoroughly tedious book. Imagine your time machine went wrong and you were stranded in the past. How could you "invent" the technology needed to improve the world,

At its heart is a potted history of every piece of technology required for modern civilisation. Short and entertaining chapters which discuss everything from leather tanning to electromagnetism. It's written in a folksy and engaging style - with daft digressions in copious footnotes.

But every chapter has the same story. The ancient Chinese/Mesopotamians/Egyptians/Greeks invented this nifty thing. But the technology was lost/ignored/misunderstood for 3,000 years until...

Everything from buttons to hot-air balloons. There's only so many times you can read that the 15th Century BCE had a working bit of kit which could have accelerated humanity if only they'd combined it with another common thing.

The book has a tendency to drift off into lists. The last quarter of the book just seems to be logic tables and chemical formulae which would probably be useful if you were stranded in the past. But otherwise just looks like filler. The footnotes, while fun at first, are a bit of a nightmare. When there are several notes on a single page - some next to each other - it requires lots of flexible finger action to get your eReader to acknowledge them.

It does skip over some of the necessary details for bits of tech - but is an excellent overview of the basics of modern civilisation. I'm uncertain how much use it would be to a "real" time traveller - but I found it thought provoking and charming.

Yoinks ago, I wrote "Why Didn't The Romans Invent The Internet?" I'm low-key obsessed with the idea that there is forgotten knowledge hanging around just waiting for us to rediscover it. This books makes the compelling case that civilisation could be thousands of years more advanced by now, if only we'd made a few key advancements at the right time.