The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible-And Other Journeys Through Knowledge

A popular author and host of the Learning Channel series Connections 2 invites readers to follow him in searching out how simple changes in one century can have far-reaching implications in another.

Picking up the theme of his bestselling Connections and utilizing cross-chapter margin references that imitate computer hypertext, Burke investigates the dynamic interplay of scientific discovery, technological innovation and social change in a dizzying, mind-expanding adventure that explores the crosscurrents of history. One chapter follows a trail from slavery in America to English Quaker abolitionist Sampson Lloyd's nail-making business to German-American immigrant engineer John Roebling's wire suspension bridges (including the Brooklyn Bridge) to rustproofing with cadmium to nuclear reactors. Accident, luck, greed, ambition and mistakes abound as Scientific American columnist Burke tries to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all things. Another typical chapter unravels the serendipitous interactions among Cyrus Dalkin's invention of carbon paper, Edison's telephone (which used sooty carbon black in the transmitter), the rise of suburbs, X-ray crystallography and DNA. Often as maddening as a pinball game, this nevertheless unique and exciting odyssey may change the way you look at the world. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another of Burke's (The Axemaker's Gift, 1995, etc.) customary grand tours of the human experience, this time unraveling the serendipitous effects of innovation. We live, Burke asserts, in a ``dynamic web of change.'' It is the very expression of our existence: As we act and are acted upon, the things we create--from thoughts to lawnmowers--have myriad unintended consequences, sometimes way down the road, or in distant lands, with inventions or ideas intermingling in unexpected or obscure but nonetheless influential ways. How have grave-robbing, the safety match, and early copy paper been linked in the great historical flow? Burke draws the connections, not just in straight narrative fashion, but also in cross-references (or ``gateways,'' as he calls them), identifying when the path of one innovation intersects the path of another. These gateways point readers to other sections of the book, jumping forward and back, establishing the connectedness of it all. And it can be good fun, this bopping about the narrative, pinballing between ideas and discoveries, creating the web: discovering how logging denuded Michigan, but also gave rise to the gold rush; how the sinking of the Allied fleet off Balaklava in 1854 influenced the creation of McAdam (later known as macadam) roads in London. Burke's story can also be read in linear mode, start to finish, with equal pleasure, one new wrinkle tripping over another as necessity, intuition, and dumb luck become the mothers of invention: An accident by a Dutch inventor in 1620 helped spawn the New Model Army by way of the female cochineal beetle. Burke's sweep is vast. Kant gets a mulling, as do Freud, the Brothers Grimm, and the Visigoth king Recared; so too do gyroscopes, lighthouses, the permanent wave in a woman's hair. Thoughtful, articulate, titillating. Burke pulls off that neatest of tricks: to amuse and instruct. (28 pages illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.