The Origins of Invention

The Origins of Invention PDF Author: Otis Tufton Mason
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Industries, Primitive
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description

The Origins of Invention

The Origins of Invention PDF Author: Otis Tufton Mason
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Industries, Primitive
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Greatest Invention

The Greatest Invention PDF Author: Silvia Ferrara
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374601631
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.

The Invention of Yesterday

The Invention of Yesterday PDF Author: Tamim Ansary
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610397975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.

Origins, Invention, Revision

Origins, Invention, Revision PDF Author: James S. Ackerman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300218718
Category : ARCHITECTURE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An illuminating collection of essays from the preeminent scholar of architectural history and theory One of the most distinguished scholars in the fields of architectural history and theory today, James Sloss Ackerman is best known for his work on Italian masters such as Palladio and Michelangelo. In this collection of essays, Ackerman offers insight into his formation and development as a scholar, as well as reflections on a range of topics. Concise, lucid, and original, this book presents deep syntheses alongside innovative approaches and a broadening geographical and chronological reach. Ackerman's enduring fascination with architecture was one unforeseen consequence of his military service in World War II, and the collection includes a revealing account of his part in the liberation of Milan as a soldier in the Fifth American Regiment. These essays represent a unique, personal journey--from the Italian Renaissance to the classical architecture of India and the work of Frank Gehry at the new museum of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Concise History of Science & Invention

Concise History of Science & Invention PDF Author: Jolyon Goddard
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426205449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
A global view of science and technology as it developed over the centuries.

Mothers and Daughters of Invention

Mothers and Daughters of Invention PDF Author: Autumn Stanley
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813521978
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 792

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Book Description
Stanley traces women's inventions in five vital areas of technology worldwide--agriculture, medicine, reproduction, machines, and computers.

The Invention of Humanity

The Invention of Humanity PDF Author: Siep Stuurman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674977513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present. Despite humans’ deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontier experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their “barbarians,” but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance. Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers—Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and more—The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizational frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa, to Europeans’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal “modern equality.” Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”

The Origins of the World

The Origins of the World PDF Author: Laura Bossi
Publisher: Editions Gallimard
ISBN: 9782072927003
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
* At the crossroads of science and art, this catalogue compares the main milestones of scientific discoveries with their parallels in the collective imagination* Featuring 300 works which testify on the influence of scientific discoveries on the imagination and art of the 19th century* Accompanies an exhibition at Musée d'Orsay in Paris: December 2020 - May 2021. The exhibition has been organized with the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada, which will take place from June - 27 September 2021The 19th century saw an unprecedented development of the natural sciences. Darwinian theory questions the origins of man, his place in Nature, his links with animals and his own animality in a world now understood as an ecosystem. This upheaval in the sciences, as well as the public debates throughout the century, deeply influenced the artists. The Musée d'Orsay and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal are devoting an exhibition to the intersection of science and the arts for the first time, in partnership with the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, which will retrace the themes of this questioning and will confront the main milestones of scientific discoveries with their parallel in the art.

The Invention of Tradition

The Invention of Tradition PDF Author: Eric Hobsbawm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521437738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book explores examples of this process of invention and addresses the complex interaction of past and present in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism.

How Invention Begins

How Invention Begins PDF Author: John H. Lienhard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195341201
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In How Invention Begins, Lienhard reconciles the ends of invention with the individual leaps upon which they are built, illuminating the vast web of individual inspirations that lie behind whole technologies. He traces, for instance, the way in which thousands of people applied their combined genius to airplanes, trains, and automobiles, revealing how a collective desire, an upwelling of fascination, a spirit of the times--a Zeitgeist--laid its hold upon inventors. The thing they all sought to create was speed itself. Can we speak of speed as an invention? To do so, he concludes, is certainly no greater a stretch than to call the car an "invention."