Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
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Tom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
after millennia of dependence on just three basic sources of energy—combustion of fuels (biomass or fossil), animate metabolism (human and animal muscles), and conversion of indirect solar flows (water and wind)—everything changed in the course of a single decade.
Vaclav Smil • Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Technical Revolutions and Their Lasting Impact)
When the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy from coal, oil, and falling water, it launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, first in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world (as we shall see in chapters 5–8). And the next leap in human welfare—the end of extreme poverty
... See moreSteven Pinker • Enlightenment Now
Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution. Modern history can be seen as an unusually rapid sequence of transitions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result of their conversions.