CONNECTIONS "A spendid companion to Burke's excellent series. . . . Marvelously illustrated and written with a lively wit." -- Los Angeles Times Connections is a brilliant new examination of the ideas, inventions and coincidences that have culminated in the major technological achevements of today. The best-selling companion volume to the "unusually intelligent television series" (Christian Science Monitor) produced by the BBC and broadcast over the Public Broadcasting Service in autumn 1979, it was conceived in the tradition of the highly popular Civilisation and The Ascent of Man. Connections masterfully combines popular science and detective work to retrace the steps that led to eight inventions that ushered in the technological age: the computer, the production line, telecommunications, the airplane, the atomic bomb, plastics, the **** rocket and television. James Burke, serving as both author and television host, untangles the pattern of interconnecting events, the accidents of time, circumstances, and place that gave rise to these inventions and to a host of related discoveries along the way. He explains, for instance, how the arrival of the cannon led eventually to the development of movies; how the **** of underwear in the twelfth century led to the invention of the printing press and how the water wheel evolved into the computer. He links these inventions with one another and with the stream of history, exploring them with dazzing insight. Text copyright 1978 by James Burke Little, Brown and Company Boston - Toronto ISBN 0-316-11685-8 - - - Click on a title below to order: Connections