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The Most Powerful Idea In The World
William Rosen
Random House Publishing Group
June 2010
On Sale: June 1, 2010
400 pages
ISBN: 1400067057
EAN: 9781400067053
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
If all measures of human advancement in the last hundred
centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost
perfectly flat line—until the eighteenth century, when the
Industrial Revolution would cause the line to shoot straight
up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress.
In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, William Rosen tells
the story of the men responsible for the Industrial
Revolution and the machine that drove it—the steam engine.
In the process he tackles the question that has obsessed
historians ever since: What made eighteenth-century Britain
such fertile soil for inventors? Rosen’s answer focuses on a
simple notion that had become enshrined in British law the
century before: that people had the right to own and profit
from their ideas.
The result was a period of frantic innovation revolving
particularly around the promise of steam power. Rosen traces
the steam engine’s history from its early days as a clumsy
but sturdy machine, to its coming-of-age driving the wheels
of mills and factories, to its maturity as a transporter for
people and freight by rail and by sea. Along the way we
enter the minds of such inventors as Thomas Newcomen and
James Watt, scientists including Robert Boyle and Joseph
Black, and philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith—all of
whose insights, tenacity, and ideas transformed first a
nation and then the world.
William Rosen is a masterly storyteller with a keen eye for
the “aha!” moments of invention and a gift for clear and
entertaining explanations of science. The Most Powerful Idea
in the World will appeal to readers fascinated with history,
science, and the hows and whys of innovation itself.
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