Listen free for 30 days
-
Invention and Innovation
- A Brief History of Hype and Failure
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $26.00
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
You may also enjoy...
-
Not the End of the World
- How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
- Written by: Hannah Ritchie
- Narrated by: Hannah Ritchie PhD
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.
-
-
Helped me see beyond my understandings
- By Anonymous User on 2024-04-15
Written by: Hannah Ritchie
-
Size
- How It Explains the World
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Stephen Perring
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Size explains the regularities—and peculiarities—of the key processes shaping life (from microbes to whales), the Earth (from asteroids to volcanic eruptions), technical advances (from architecture to transportation), and societies and economies (from cities to wages).
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
How the World Really Works
- The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Stephen Perring
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don’t know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check—because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
-
-
How the World Really Works [For Oligarchs]
- By CoreDev on 2024-04-14
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
Power Density
- A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Daniel Henning
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this book, Vaclav Smil argues that power density is a key determinant of the nature and dynamics of energy systems. Any understanding of complex energy systems must rely on quantitative measures of many fundamental variables. Power density—the rate of energy flux per unit of area—is an important but largely overlooked measure. Smil provides the first systematic, quantitative appraisal of power density, offering detailed reviews of the power densities of renewable energy flows, fossil fuels, thermal electricity generation, and all common energy uses.
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
Numbers Don't Lie
- 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Ben Prendergast
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment - your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy?
-
-
It Helps To Understand Numbers
- By Anonymous User on 2023-03-03
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
A Mind at Play
- How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- Written by: Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
-
-
Fantastic
- By Amazon Customer on 2018-09-18
Written by: Rob Goodman, and others
-
Not the End of the World
- How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
- Written by: Hannah Ritchie
- Narrated by: Hannah Ritchie PhD
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.
-
-
Helped me see beyond my understandings
- By Anonymous User on 2024-04-15
Written by: Hannah Ritchie
-
Size
- How It Explains the World
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Stephen Perring
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Size explains the regularities—and peculiarities—of the key processes shaping life (from microbes to whales), the Earth (from asteroids to volcanic eruptions), technical advances (from architecture to transportation), and societies and economies (from cities to wages).
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
How the World Really Works
- The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Stephen Perring
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don’t know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check—because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
-
-
How the World Really Works [For Oligarchs]
- By CoreDev on 2024-04-14
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
Power Density
- A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Daniel Henning
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this book, Vaclav Smil argues that power density is a key determinant of the nature and dynamics of energy systems. Any understanding of complex energy systems must rely on quantitative measures of many fundamental variables. Power density—the rate of energy flux per unit of area—is an important but largely overlooked measure. Smil provides the first systematic, quantitative appraisal of power density, offering detailed reviews of the power densities of renewable energy flows, fossil fuels, thermal electricity generation, and all common energy uses.
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
Numbers Don't Lie
- 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Ben Prendergast
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment - your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy?
-
-
It Helps To Understand Numbers
- By Anonymous User on 2023-03-03
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
A Mind at Play
- How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- Written by: Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
-
-
Fantastic
- By Amazon Customer on 2018-09-18
Written by: Rob Goodman, and others
-
The Song of the Cell
- An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
- Written by: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human.
-
-
Another success
- By afsaneh on 2023-06-16
Written by: Siddhartha Mukherjee
-
The Rational Optimist
- How Prosperity Evolves
- Written by: Matt Ridley
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.
-
-
Good but Agenda-Laden, biased.
- By xeea on 2019-11-18
Written by: Matt Ridley
-
Made in the USA
- The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Made in the USA, Vaclav Smil powerfully rebuts the notion that manufacturing is a relic of predigital history and that the loss of American manufacturing is a desirable evolutionary step toward a pure service economy. Smil argues that no advanced economy can prosper without a strong, innovative manufacturing sector and the jobs it creates. Smil assesses various suggestions for solving America's manufacturing crisis, including lowering corporate tax rates, promoting research and development, and improving public education. Will America act to reinvigorate manufacturing?
-
-
Interesting but not enlightening
- By Amazon Customer on 2023-01-15
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
Skunk Works
- A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed
- Written by: Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, the never-before-told story behind America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies. Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of Cold War confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds.
-
-
A must for aviation buffs
- By BH on 2018-04-25
Written by: Ben R. Rich, and others
-
Grand Transitions
- How the Modern World Was Made
- Written by: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What makes the modern world work? The answer to this deceptively simple question lies in four "grand transitions" of civilization - in populations, agriculture, energy, and economics - that have transformed the way we live.
Written by: Vaclav Smil
-
AI 2041
- Ten Visions for Our Future
- Written by: Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin, Justin Chien, Soneela Nankani, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
AI will be the defining development of the 21st century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work, however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order.
-
-
Great book about future
- By Kumar on 2021-12-10
Written by: Kai-Fu Lee, and others
Publisher's Summary
From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts.
The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm.
Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions.
Inventions that failed to dominate as promised:
Airships
Nuclear fission
Supersonic flight
Inventions that turned disastrous:
Leaded gasoline
DDT
Chlorofluorocarbons
Inventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial):
Travel in vacuum (hyperloop)
Nitrogen-fixing cereals
Nuclear fusion
Finally, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.
Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.