A million people tune in twice each week to hear John H. Lienhard's radio program "The Engines of Our Ingenuity." Now Lienhard has gathered together his reflections on the nature of technology, culture, human inventiveness, and the history of engineering in this fascinating new book. The Engines of Our Ingenuity offers a series of intriguing glimpses into technology--as a mirror, as a danger, as a product of heroic hubris. The book brims with insightful observations. Lienhard writes, for instance, that the history of technology is a history of us--we are the machines we create. Indeed, our very first technology, farming, which demanded year-long care, dramatically changed the rhythms of human life and the course of our history. We also learn that war does not necessarily fuel invention (radar, jets, and the digital computer all emerged before World War II began), and that the medieval Church was actually a driving force behind the growth of Western technology (Cistercian monasteries were virtual factories, putting water wheels to work in wood-cutting, forging, and olive crushing). Lienhard also illuminates the unpredictable nature of the inventive mind, leading us through one fascinating example after another. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, for instance, were highly passionate, even combative figures, while the almost invisible Josiah Willard Gibbs, living a quiet, outwardly uneventful life, was probably America's greatest scientist. Lienhard ranges far and wide with stories of inventors, mathematicians, and engineers, telling the story of the canoe, the DC-3, the Hoover Dam, the diode, and the sewing machine. The result is less history than autobiography--for the autobiography of all of us is written in our machines.

The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture

John H. Lienhard IV

History

Oxford University Press

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 as Katherine 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.

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

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

This introduction to heat transfer offers advanced undergraduate and graduate engineering students a solid foundation in the subjects of conduction, convection, radiation, and phase-change, in addition to the related topic of mass transfer. A staple of engineering courses around the world for more than three decades, it has been revised and updated regularly by the authors, a pair of recognized experts in the field. The text addresses the implications, limitations, and meanings of many aspects of heat transfer, connecting the subject to its real-world applications and developing students' insight into related phenomena. Three introductory chapters form a minicourse in heat transfer, covering all of the subjects discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. This unique and effective feature introduces heat exchangers early in the development, rather than at the end. The authors also present a novel and simplified method for dimensional analysis, and they capitalize on the similarity of natural convection and film condensation to develop these two topics in a parallel manner. Worked examples and end-of-chapter exercises appear throughout the book, along with well-drawn, illuminating figures.

A Heat Transfer Textbook: Fourth Edition (Dover Civil and Mechanical Engineering)

John H. Lienhard V

Reference

Dover Publications

Statistical Thermodynamics

Science & Math

Tien, Chang L.

Physics

CRC-Press

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Books by John H. Lienhard IV