100 Diagrams That Changed The World

Description

A fascinating collection of the most significant plans, sketches, drawings and illustrations that have changed the way we think about the world. From primitive cave paintings to the complicated DNA double helix drawn by Crick and Watson, they chart dramatic breakthroughs in our understanding of the world and its history. This fascinating book encompasses everything from the triple spirals found on prehistoric megalithic tombs dating right up to the drawings sent out on the side of space exploration probes. Discover Leonardo da Vinci's beautiful technical drawings, pre-empting the invention of manned flight, Copernicus's bold diagrams that dared to tell us that Earth was not at the centre of the Universe, as well as the history of the more everyday diagrams that we now take for granted. Every diagram is clearly illustrated and placed into context with very accessible text even for the lay reader. Diagrams include: Egyptian Book of the Dead, Chauvet cave drawings, Aztec Calendar, sheet music, Vitruvian Man, Galileo's telescope, Hooke's Micrographia, the Porphyrian Tree, Dunhuang Star Map, Newcomen's steam engine, the Morse Code, Brooks Slave Ship, William Playfair's bar chart, Thomas Edison's light bulb, Nazi propaganda map, sewing patterns, Feynman Diagrams, the DNA double helix, IKEA flat-pack furniture instructions, the World Wide Web schematic, Carl Sagan's Pioneer Plaque.

Scott Christianson, Ph.D. is a prize-winning author. His books include 100 Diagrams That Changed the World, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America; Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House; Notorious Prisons: Inside the World's Most Feared Institutions; Bodies of Evidence: Forensics and Crime; Freeing Charles: The Epic Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Village Voice, and Newsday.