Books like How We Got to Now

01

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick · Science

The Information traces the history of information — as a concept, a technology, and a way of understanding the universe — from the talking drums of West Africa through the telegraph, the printing press, the telephone, and into the digital age.

A kindred history read.

02

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.

Shares innovation and technology history with How We Got to Now.

03

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick · Science

Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, tells the story of how a loose network of scientists working across meteorology, mathematics, biology, and physics in the 1960s and 1970s developed chaos theory — the study of systems that are deterministic but unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes.

A kindred history read.

04

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · Science

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

A kindred history read.

05

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred history read.

06

How the Internet Happened

Brian McCullough · History

How the Internet Happened covers the commercial history of the internet from the release of Mosaic in 1993 to the launch of the iPhone in 2007 — the window in which the web went from academic experiment to the defining infrastructure of modern life.

Shares innovation and technology history with How We Got to Now.

07

Americana

Bhu Srinivasan · History

Americana is Bhu Srinivasan's attempt to tell the history of American capitalism through its defining industries and the entrepreneurs who built them.

Both dig into innovation.

08

Empires of Light

Jill Jonnes · History

Empires of Light is Jill Jonnes's history of the War of Currents — the late-nineteenth-century battle between Thomas Edison's direct-current electrical system and George Westinghouse's alternating-current system, with Nikola Tesla as the third figure whose genius made AC practical.

Both dig into innovation.

09

The Last Days of Night

Graham Moore · History

The Last Days of Night is Graham Moore's historical novel about the legal and commercial war between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over the electrification of America.

Both dig into innovation.

10

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.

Both dig into innovation.

11

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon · History

Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the history of ARPANET, the government-funded network that became the technical foundation of the internet.

Both dig into innovation.

12

Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy

Thomas Sowell · Economics

Thomas Sowell published the first edition of Basic Economics in 2000 and has since revised and expanded it through five editions.

Both dig into unintended consequences.