History · Similar reads

Books like Empires of Light

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes is about innovation, electricity, industrial history. If that's what drew you in, here are 6 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.

  1. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
    The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

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    The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

    Walter Isaacson · Science

    The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's history of the digital revolution, tracing the development of computers and the internet from Ada Lovelace's conceptualization of programming in the 1840s through the emergence of the modern internet, personal computer, and smartphone.

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  2. The Soul of a New Machine
    The Soul of a New Machine

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    The Soul of a New Machine

    Tracy Kidder · Memoir

    Tracy Kidder's account of the engineers at Data General Corporation who designed a new minicomputer under enormous competitive pressure in the late 1970s won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982 and effectively invented the genre of technology-company narrative journalism.

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  3. Thunderstruck
    Thunderstruck

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    Thunderstruck

    Erik Larson · History

    Thunderstruck interweaves two narratives set in Edwardian England and the North Atlantic: the story of Guglielmo Marconi's obsessive drive to make wireless telegraphy work across the Atlantic Ocean, and the story of Hawley Harvey Crippen, a mild-mannered American doctor who murdered his wife in London in 1910 and fled with his mistress — only to be captured at sea because of a wireless telegraph message, the first criminal caught with the technology's help.

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  4. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
    Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

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    Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

    Erik Larson · History

    Dead Wake tells the story of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed the British ocean liner off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard, including 128 Americans.

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  5. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
    1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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    1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

    Charles C. Mann · History

    Charles Mann's 1491 sets out to correct a widespread misconception: that the Americas before Columbus were a mostly empty wilderness populated by small, isolated bands of hunter-gatherers living in gentle harmony with an untouched nature.

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  6. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
    1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

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    1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

    Charles C. Mann · History

    Where 1491 ends, 1493 begins.

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