Synopsis
From Steam to Silicon offers narrative histories of five great technological revolutions—the steam engine, electricity, digital computers, the internet, and artificial intelligence—tracing how each developed and transformed society.
The book is a work of narrative synthesis, drawing together technical histories, biographies, and contemporary accounts to follow how successive general-purpose technologies move from isolated experiments to world-shaping infrastructure. By placing these revolutions side by side, it compresses decades of specialized history into a single comparative arc, making visible patterns that are often hidden when each era is studied in isolation.
Blending vivid storytelling with careful research, the book follows inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and institutions as they grappled with new machines whose ultimate impact was far from obvious at the time. The story unfolds through vivid narrative vignettes from the lives of inventors, engineers, and financiers—including James Watt, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, Gordon Moore, Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen, Frank Rosenblatt, Yann LeCun and many more.
Written for general readers, technologists, and history enthusiasts, From Steam to Silicon offers a coherent framework for understanding how transformative technologies actually spread—through people, markets, and time—rather than how they are remembered after the fact.