Transforming the Twentieth Century

This companion volume follows the innovations introduced before 1913, which Smil detailed in the first book, through their later evolution, and adds the origins and elaboration of the fundamental advances that were distinctively of the twentieth century. His argument is that the century was rooted in the technical achievements of 1871 to 1913 but differed markedly from the preceding hundred years because of several unprecedented combinations. It travelled the same path at a very different pace and with different ambitions and intents, raising both the magnitude of output and the spatial spread of mass industrial production to levels that are in many ways incomparable with what came before. Twentieth-century science and engineering also conquered a number of fundamental challenges left unresolved in 1913, several of which critics had judged insoluble. The book is organised topically, with chapters on electricity, engines, materials and syntheses, and information techniques. It ends with an extended examination of the contradictory consequences of technical progress, confronting systems that delivered liberating simplicity alongside overwhelming complexity, unprecedented affluence alongside unprecedented economic gaps, greater security alongside greater fear, and the means to protect the biosphere while undermining some of the biophysical foundations of life on Earth.

Written from the catalogue listing at Blackwell's reproducing the Oxford University Press publisher's synopsis.

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