It All Started with the Wheel: The Evolution of Inventions from the Axe to the Laser

Do great discoveries come from sudden inspiration—or from years of persistent hard work? And sometimes remarkable solutions appear simply from a desire to make life easier for the people around us.

With this book, you’ll travel through the centuries: from the first stone tools to humanoid robots, from the origins of humankind in Africa to the California capital of the digital age. Along the way, you’ll meet Archimedes, Ibn al-Haytham, Leonardo da Vinci, Alfred Nobel, Mikhail Kalashnikov, and Steve Jobs.

You’ll learn how people managed without clocks, what temperature the earliest thermometer actually showed, why the programming language Ada83 was named after the daughter of Lord Byron—and when we’ll finally be able to wear “sprayable” clothing and talk to our home pets using a translator.

Denis Gutleben’s lively, engaging, and slightly ironic stories about inventors and their ideas will reveal unexpected facts from the past and help you look at familiar things we use every day—almost without noticing them.