How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Johnson, Steven (2014) Hardcover

Light bulbs, sound recordings, air-conditioning, a glass of clean tap water, a wristwatch, a glass lens': these everyday things are the subjects of Johnson's book. In six chapters on glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light he traces the histories of problems and the attempts to solve them - from Galileo's watching a pendulum swing in Pisa cathedral to atomic clocks keeping time in microseconds - and he considers how these scientific innovations have set in motion social change.