Ainissa Ramirez:

Any book on any of these subject would contain similar facts, but Ramirez adds historical anecdotes that are often not well known (how many people know what Einstein worked on when he was an employee of the Zurich patent office?) and turns each fact into an elaborate story with the skill of a consummate novelist.

The stories are not related, each chapter being an independent essay. In fact, there are unrelated stories within each chapter (the book begins with Benjamin Huntsman's crucible cast steel but then jumps to Warren Marrison's quartz-crystal clock and then to the introduction of standardized time in the USA and then briefly to Einstein's job at the Zurich patent office and then to Louis Armstrong's jazz improvisation...) The chapter on glass begins with Alexander Fleming inventing penicillin but then turns to Otto Schott, the German inventor of special glasses used in laboratory instruments (notably borosilicate glass in 1893), and to Corning, a glass company that made glasses for train signals, specifically to Corning's physicist Jesse Littleton and his wife Bessie who developed pyrex in 1915. Suddenly the chapter jumps to Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 and to Joseph-John Thompson's discovery of the electron in 1897. Fascinating, but also a bit confusing and arbitrary (a lot of inventions contributed to these achievements). The last chapter begins with neuroscience’s most famous patient, Phineas Gage: a traumatic brain injury resulted in a dramatic change of personality. But that's also the beginning. Ramirez then tells the story of George Coy, who in 1878 opened the first telephone switchboard for Bell's telephone (in New Haven) Almond Strowger, who in 1892 installed the first electromechanical telephone exchange in a town of Indiana (La Porte). Then we are taken to Bell Labs to witness the birth of the transistor, but Ramirez hardly mentions the inventors and instead follows the career of Gordon Teal, the man who went on to found Texas Instruments. I guess she considers Teal particularly relevant because he was the first one to sell transistors made of silicon (the original ones were made of germanium). And then the chapter jumps to the Internet and to the popular discussion of whether the Internet makes us smarter of dumber, with reference in particular to Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows". The chapter ends with an amateurish discussion on knowledge, wisdom, understanding and creativity.

These "episodes" are often original research by her, that uncover long neglected facts, and that gives the book a sense of a collection of trivia. For example, the chapter on photography doesn't discuss the invention of photography at all. It has a few pages on the famous story of Leland Stanford hiring a photographer to find out whether a horse is ever suspended in the air, a few pages on the real inventor of the celluloid roll film (Hannibal Goodwin, a pastor), and then a long detour on the white bias that was built into photographic film from the beginning (and that persists today in digital pixels) and on the fight in 1970 by Polaroid employess Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams to get the company out of racist South Africa. Lorna Roth's paper “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm - Colour Balance, Image Technologies and Cognitive Equity” (2009) first revealed the pervasive anti-black bias in photographic technology. She points out that Kodak finally fixed that color imbalancy because of complaints from furniture and chocolate manufacturers.

But don't look for exhaustive "histories" in this book: she can dive into minor details for several pages while skipping some of the most influential historical developments. Her story of the electric light omits the Europeans (it doesn't even mention the invention of the dynamo) and doesn't even mention Charles Brush (the first city to demonstrate electric lighting was Cleveland, and even the first street lighting in New York was provided by Brush, not Edison). She is more interested in discussing the effect of artificial lighting on human habits and human biology. She ends that chapter by discussing how to save fireflies and other wildlife that is endangered by the constant lighting, and how to combat "light pollution".

Sometimes she exaggerates slightly her stories, perhaps influenced by Hollywood movies. For example, she writes that "thousands" of British soldiers were killed in the Battle of New Orleans (1815) but the correct number is actually 291 (of course 291 dead is not as dramatic as "thousands" so it wouldn't have the same effect).