Thursday, February 21, 2019

Book Excerpt for the Day


    Not all technology is the future.  Some technology succeeds in a changing society and some fails.  And even when an idea is right, the machine that introduces it to the society may not be.  Cai Lun did not invent paper, Gutenberg did not invent the printing press, Robert Fulton did not invent the steamboat, and Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb.  Rather, these were people who took existing ideas or machines that were not suiting society’s needs and reworked them into technologies that did.  It says something about our world that we seldom remember the person who came up with an idea, but canonize the pragmatist who made it commercially viable.


    (from Paper – Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky)

     8*/10.  The complete review is here.
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