Engineering : Ponderables

Here is the essential guide to engineering, an authoritative reference book and timeline about how technology has given shape to our civilization.

Engineering predates humanity; Homo habilis was knapping hand axes from fist-sized flints more than a thousand centuries before the dawn of modern humans. Admittedly the development of technology was slow back then—but we’ve made up for lost time since. Striding from the Stone Age to Silicon Valley in 100 steps, we will see how our inventors have seized every scientific breakthrough, new material, and better understanding to improve daily life and expand the scope of civilization.

From reshaping rivers and containing the forces of nature to constructing artificial lifeforms and perhaps one day even taming alien planets, engineers think big. These men and women of action make our world.

About the Author

Tom Jackson has been a writer and editor for 20 years. He has written more than 80 books and contributed to hundreds more. Tom gets to write about a wide range of subjects, everything from axolotls to zoroastrianism. However, his specialties are natural history, technology and all things scientific. Tom spends his days finding fun ways of communicating these kinds of facts, new and old, to all age groups and reading abilities. Tom lives in Bristol, England, with his wife and three children.

He studied zoology at Bristol University and has had spells working at the zoos in Jersey and Surrey. Tom has also worked as a conservationist, which saw him planting trees in Somerset, surveying Vietnamese jungle and rescuing wildlife from drought-ridden Zimbabwe. Writing jobs have also taken him to the Galápagos Islands, the Amazon rain forest, the coral reefs of Indonesia and the Sahara Desert. Nowadays, he can be found mainly in the attic.