Nine remarkable men produced inventions that changed the world. The printing press, the telephone, powered flight, recording and others have made the modern world what it is. But who were the men who had these ideas and made reality of them? As David Angus shows, they were very different quiet, boisterous, confident, withdrawn but all had a moment of vision allied to single-minded determination to battle through numerous prototypes and produced something that really worked. It is a fascinating account for younger listeners.

From the first printing press to the World Wide Web—the Cat looks at inventors and inventions that have changed our lives! The Cat in the Hat goes back in time to meet with the masterminds of more than a dozen inventions that made a major impact on our lives today—from famous figures like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright brothers to lesser-known ones like Garrett Morgan, Mary Anderson, and Tim Berners-Lee. Children will learn basic information about each invention, as well as fascinating facts like how Guttenberg’s famous printing machine was made from an old wine press, how a steaming teakettle may have inspired the creation of the steam engine, and how table salt changed the history of photography. Ideal for supporting the Common Core State Standards, and a natural for fans of the hit PBS Kids show The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!, this is a great way to introduce beginning readers to science!

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."

Upon its invention in the mid-1400s, the printing press instantly became a revolutionary device. It introduced literacy to the masses and led Europe out of the Middle Ages. This book explores the press' exciting history, the social and political conditions in place at the time Johannes Gutenberg invented it, and the changes the invention wrought afterward. It traces the evolution of moveable type and information dissemination up to modern electronic communications technology, examining the positive and negative effects of these developments, both in the past and on democracy and humankind today. This book will give readers a new appreciation for the written word, whether it is printed on paper or displayed on a screen.

This classic work, first published as a Pelican Original in 1955 and maintained in successive editions until 1980 is now available in a finely illustrated larger format book, drawing on the collections and curatorial expertise of The British Library. It has been completely revised and brought up to date, covering topics such as censorship, best-sellers, the invention of lithography and the connection between printing and education. It is of particular use to anyone studying the huge technological changes that the printing industry has experienced during its long timespan.

This is the third and final volume of a set of studies on the development of humanism in the northern Netherlands and the adjoining parts of Germany between 1469, when, in the oldest letters preserved of Rudolph Agricola and Rudolph von Langen, first mention is made of a group of early humanist scholars at the Adwert monastery near Groningen, and 1625, when the humanist Ubbo Emmius died, who was the first rector of the university of Groningen. The earlier two volumes are Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444-1485) (1988) and Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489) and Northern Humanism (1993). This last volume has papers on Regnerus Praedinius (1510-1559), Alexander Hegius (ca.1433-1498), Alexander Candidus ( 1555), Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489), the Bremen Gymnasium Illustre between 1560-1630, humanist commentaries on Boethius, scholasticism and humanism, humanism and philosophy, Agricola Latinus, Ubbo Emmius's 'art of description', Agricola's dialectics at Louvain, Agricola on deliberative speech, humanism and reformation, Erasmus and geography, Agricola in Pavia, Dutch students at Italian universities (1425-1575), relations between Heidelberg and the Low Countries in the late 16th century, the Modern Devotion and humanism.Many of the papers were originally presented at a conference in 1996, but they have been extensively rewritten and edited, and a number of new pieces have been included. An updated bibliography in this volume makes the three volumes together an indispensable tool for scholars of philology, literature, history, philosophy and theology of the period.Contributors include: F. Akkerman, J.C. Bedaux, C.P.M. Burger, C.M.A. Caspers, T. Elsmann, M. Goris, M.J.F.M. Hoenen, P. Kooiman, H.A. Krop, Z.R.W.M. von Martels, L.W. Nauta, J. Papy, M. van der Poel, E. Rummel, R.J. Schoeck, A. Sottili, A. Tervoort, A.E. Walter, and A.G. Weiler.

Gutenberg, simply put, helped found the Modern Age.".

Despite the importance of books and the written word in Chinese society, the history of the book in China is a topic that has been little explored. This pioneering volume of essays, written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, introduces the major issues in the social and cultural history of the book in late imperial China. Informed by many insights from the rich literature on the history of the Western book, these essays investigate the relationship between the manuscript and print culture; the emergence of urban and rural publishing centers; the expanding audience for books; the development of niche markets and specialized publishing of fiction, drama, non-Han texts, and genealogies; and more.

Major transformations in society are always accompanied by parallel transformations in systems of social communication – what we call the media. In this book, historian Frédéric Barbier provides an important new economic, political and social analysis of the first great 'media revolution' in the West: Gutenbergs invention of the printing press in the mid fifteenth century. In great detail and with a wealth of historical evidence, Barbier charts the developments in manuscript culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and shows how the steadily increasing need for written documents initiated the processes of change which culminated with Gutenberg. The fifteenth century is presented as the 'age of start-ups' when investment and research into technologies that were new at the time, including the printing press, flourished. Tracing the developments through the sixteenth century, Barbier analyses the principal features of this first media revolution: the growth of technology, the organization of the modern literary sector, the development of surveillance and censorship and the invention of the process of 'mediatization'. He offers a rich variety of examples from cities all over Europe, as well as looking at the evolution of print media in China and Korea. This insightful re-interpretation of the Gutenberg revolution also looks beyond the specific historical context to draw connections between the advent of print in the Rhine Valley (paper valley) and our own modern digital revolution. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern history, of literature and the media, and will appeal to anyone interested in what remains one of the greatest cultural revolutions of all time.

DIVLong before the invention of printing, let alone the availability of a daily newspaper, people desired to be informed. In the pre-industrial era news was gathered and shared through conversation and gossip, civic ceremony, celebration, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, edicts, ballads, journals, and the first news-sheets, expanding the news community from local to worldwide. This groundbreaking book tracks the history of news in ten countries over the course of four centuries. It evaluates the unexpected variety of ways in which information was transmitted in the premodern world as well as the impact of expanding news media on contemporary events and the lives of an ever-more-informed public. Andrew Pettegree investigates who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and journalists trustworthy; and people’s changed sense of themselves as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pettegree concludes, transmission of news had become so efficient and widespread that European citizens—now aware of wars, revolutions, crime, disasters, scandals, and other events—were poised to emerge as actors in the great events unfolding around them./div