The Alchemy of Us

December 23, 2019
Ramirez, a materials scientist and science writer, devotes her fine debut to the impact of eight inventions. While some might seem obvious—steel railroad tracks, light bulbs, telegraph wires, and silicon chips—Ramirez has a knack for finding unexpected examples of their impact. Railway lines, she argues, by making consumer products newly available on a national scale, enabled the transformation of Christmas, with big business’s connivance, into today’s gift-giving occasion: “The Christmas we know was born in a boardroom, swaddled in steel.” Some of her choices may seem less obvious, including clocks and scientific glassware. But here, too, Ramirez makes a persuasive case for their transformative power. Standardizing and improving glass’s chemical configuration made it an invaluable material in scientific laboratories, thus leading to “an understanding of how our bodies work, how the heavens move, and how other worlds exist in a drop of water.” Making clocks more accurate, meanwhile, helped end the once-widespread practice of “segmented sleep,” in which people customarily slept in two separate phases over the course of a night. By explaining how inventions both exotic and mundane transformed society, Ramirez’s ingenious survey illuminates the effect of science in a manner accessible to a wide readership.

March 1, 2020

Materials scientist and science communicator Ramirez (Newton's Football) examines the development, evolution, and social implications of eight indispensable and world-changing inventions. Organizing chapters by function--"Convey" covers Morse's electromagnetic telegraph but also the effects of social media on our ability to converse--the author adds vignettes to frame or serve as counterpoint to linear biographical sketches of historic innovators. She also urges readers to consider how our material innovations alter us in turn. Since artificial light disrupts sleep and computer algorithms tempt us into cognitive shallows, we cannot view technological change as overwhelmingly positive, maintains Ramirez. With depth and in a tone that contrasts with Tim Harford's broader Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, Ramirez considers both well-known and historically overlooked inventors, and depicts them as complicated, flawed individuals, with claims supported in a highly readable annotated bibliography. VERDICT Western (especially American) history or history of technology buffs should appreciate Ramirez's efforts to raise the attention of issues impacting scientists, engineers, and technologists.--Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

A user-friendly, wide-ranging history of material science. A self-described "science evangelist," Ramirez conveys enthusiasm for her field, which lies at the intersection of physics and chemistry and concerns how one can, in the words of an old mentor, "change the way that atoms act to make them do new things." Timekeeping, for example, altered human behavior irrevocably. Extend Marshall McLuhan's "extensions of man" theory of media, and you have an example of a technology that changed how we sleep. "Before the Industrial Revolution," Ramirez writes, "our ancestors slept at night in two separate intervals," going to bed around 9:00 or 10:00, awakening after midnight, staying up for an hour or so, and then returning to bed. This "segmented sleep" ended with the invention of not just the clock and its demand for regularity and punctuality, but also artificial light that allowed people to stay up later, turning night into day. (She doesn't hit on it hard, but there was also the demand of factory and office owners that people show up and stay at work.) Material changes behavior, then--and that change evolves. For example, Samuel Morse missed arriving at his ailing wife's bed as she lay dying, and she was buried without him, spurring the invention of the telegraph. Ramirez communicates gently but with depth of detail and meaning. One of the best moments in this satisfying book concerns how 43-year-old Carl Sagan came to decide what music should be sent into space on the Voyager mission to illustrate earthling sounds, an inventory that started off as European classical music and ended with a broad range of sounds from around the entire planet. Just so, Ramirez takes pains to include examples of innovators and scientists beyond the usual suspects (though Einstein and company do figure), making the text an inspiration to budding scientists of all backgrounds. Entertaining and elucidating--popular science done right, with enthusiasm and without dumbing-down.

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