Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Charles F. Kettering’s legacy as a philanthropist is memorialized in the names of the institutions he supported such as the Kettering Foundation and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. As an engineer, I’m more familiar with is reputation as an inventor and innovator, especially in automotive engineering.

Kettering’s associate, T. A. Boyd, memorialized him in the biography Professional Amateur. I think the title is intended to convey Kettering’s humility and determination to not let expertise or established knowledge get in the way of progress. As an engineer, and arguably a scientist, Kettering was devoted to experimentation.

As with others of his era (he was born in 1876), Kettering’s education was not traditional by current standards. After graduating high school, he began teaching in one-room schoolhouses in Ohio such as the one he had attended. He later attended the College of Wooster, studying Greek with an eye toward becoming a pastor, and eventually graduated from the Ohio State University with a degree in electrical engineering. Problems with his eyes caused interruptions in his formal education.

Kettering valued his school experience, but he also valued his practical experience. He got a job installing poles for a telephone company and worked his way into installing lines and switchboards. He and friends undertook amateur experiments in chemistry and electricity. Even as a child he took great interest in nature.

After introducing us to his early life, the book turns to his career as an inventor and research engineer. He established what is now Delco, which he sold to General Motors. He had a long career leading the research efforts at GM. The final chapters of the book describe Kettering’s views on business and education and his career as a public speaker.

Kettering met his wife, Olive, while working for a rural telephone company. Their son, Gene, followed his father into engineering and eventually had a successful career in designing and building diesel-electric locomotives a General Motors.

Boyd was a friend of Kettering, who was still alive when Professional Amateur was published. Needless to say, the book is very complimentary to its subject. Few faults are attributed to the man, except that Kettering is depicted as being so absorbed in his research that he would overlook social conventions like keeping a nice suit clean, entertaining guests, or remembering the purpose of his appointments. The research engineer left his business affairs mostly in the hands of trusted partners so he could concentrate on the work that interested him, though Boyd’s depiction indicates Kettering was shrewd about business.

I don’t think the book is intended for children, but it is written in simple and direct style that might be accessible to many young readers. It was published in 1957, so more recent or thorough biographies may be available. For instance, Kettering introduced tetraethyl lead to gasoline as a way to reduce knock and improve fuel efficiency. Though it was considered safe at the time (as Boyd points out), the lead emissions from automobiles has be reevaluated sense and we no longer use leaded gasoline. The book was written before anyone was seriously aware of or concerned about this issue, so it does not consider it.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

Boyd, T. A. Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1957.

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Hedwig Kiesler was a headstrong Austrian girl with visions of becoming a Hollywood star. She was so determined that she dropped out of school to star working at a Berlin film studio, and by 16 she was acting professionally. She eventually achieved Hollywood stardom as Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr had another, lesser known life, as an inventor. She, along with avant-garde composer George Antheil, invented a technology that makes much of modern communication possible. Richard Rhodes focuses on this part of Lamarr’s life in Hedy’s Folly.

The woman known for her beauty was interested in technology from youth. She enjoyed walking with her father, a banker, who explained how things worked. Her first marriage was to munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. Though she was mostly a trophy to be shown off to his friends, she paid close attention as he and the people he entertained discussed weapons and other technology. When she moved to Hollywood, she sat up a little shop in her home and took up inventing as a hobby.

When Lamarr learned of the sinking by U-boats that were intended to carry children from Britain to safer locations in Canada, she put her head to the idea of improved torpedoes to combat the underwater threat. The torpedo would be remote controlled. To avoid attempts to jam the signal, the torpedo receiver and controller transmitter would can radio frequencies rapidly in a synchronized manner.  She enlisted the assistance of Antheil, who had experience trying to control and synchronize multiple player pianos, to work out a practical implementation of the concept.

The idea was received well by the National Inventors Council, apparently even receiving the endorsement of automotive engineer Charles Kettering. The Navy did not think the idea was practical, but it did by the patent that was awarded to the Hollywood pair in 1941. Eventually, the frequency-hopping technology invented by Lamarr was developed by the U.S. military for many communication applications.

Spread spectrum, a somewhat broader category of radio communication of which frequency-hopping was the original type, was unveiled from the military secrecy in 1976 with the publication of a textbook on the subject by Robert C. Dixon. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved fairly quickly to make room in the radio spectrum for applications of spread spectrum. These were mostly junk frequencies that had been set aside for non-communication uses. Because it broadcast on multiple frequencies, spread spectrum is less likely to be disrupted by interference by other transmissions, like a microwave (Lamarr invented frequency hopping to avoid jamming). Another important aspect of the FCC rule was that these frequencies could be used without a license.

This technology is widely used today. Wi-fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and RFID all use spread spectrum communication. It is the basis of the wireless communication between computers that has shaped the way we live, work, and behave in coffeehouses.

Lamarr and Antheil didn’t receive much recognition for their groundbreaking invention until after it started making its way into American households and pockets. In 1997, Lamarr (and posthumously Antheil) received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award when she was 82 years old. By then she had retired to a very private life in Florida, where she live until January 2000.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Rhodes, Richard. Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Levenson, Thomas. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the Worlds Greatest Scientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Scientists who become detectives have been the stuff of fiction before CSI: launched it into great popularity. Even Sherlock Holmes was a capable amateur scientist, though his scientific inquiries were aimed at making him a better detective. Though the scientist as detective is a fairly popular form of crime literature, the truth of it in one case is stranger than fiction.

Isaac Newton, renowned in his own day as well as ours as one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, left his post at Cambridge University to take a more lucrative patronage job as Warden of the Mint. One of his ostensible duties as warden was to investigate and prosecute cases of counterfeiting. It would be something like appointing Stephen Hawking to direct the Secret Service.

Typically, holders of this position weren’t expected to do more than the minimum required, leaving most of the work to assistants. Newton took his post seriously and pursued crime fighting with the same discipline and analytical rigor he used as a scientist while also completely re-minting all of England’s silver coins.

Readers who are already familiar with Newton’s scientific life might find that Levenson devotes too much of the book to it. His alchemical studies are more important to his work as warden because, even though esoteric from a scientific view, it made him familiar with the material as methods used by the mint and counterfeiters.

Newton put away (or to death) many counterfeiters. Levenson focuses on one, William Chaloner. Chaloner was an extraordinarily successful counterfeiter at his peak and much more ambitious and smart than most of his fellows. Where Newton’s life before the mint gets too much attention, Chaloner’s life doesn’t get enough. Since he was famous mostly for his crimes and some details of a counterfeiter’s life are necessarily hidden, there is probably much less source material to use to reconstruct his life.


The book builds up a little slowly through Newton’s younger day and then seems to rush through his mastership of the mint and his battle of wits with Chaloner. In spite of this weakness, the book is an interesting look on a lesser know chapter of Newton’s life.

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

The technology that has the potential for a breakthrough that could revolutionize life in the next few decades is not one many might think of. It’s the battery. The next generation of battery could make affordable, long-range electric vehicles available to the masses. They could make variable energy sources like wind and solar more viable competitors to traditional, fuel-burning energy.

Though it is not widely publicized, major companies, start-ups and even government agencies are involved in a race to bring the next generation battery to the market. The company that creates it and the nation that can establish the manufacturing base for it will be in a position to make a lot of money. It’s a dramatic story, which Steve Levine relates in The Powerhouse.

Levine provides some background on the development of the lithium ion battery and improvements to it. His focus, however, is Argonne National Laboratory.

Argonne, located near Chicago, started as a lab to research nuclear energy and weaponry. It traces its history back to the Manhattan Project and the University of Chicago lab where Enrico Fermi started a manmade, self-sustained nuclear chain reaction. At the close of the book, Argonne was taking the lead of a hub of battery technology development aimed particularly at creating the battery that will put electric cars in millions of garages.

Argonne is not the only player in the field. Levine also reports on some of the companies, large and small, and countries that are staking out their places in the field. Automakers, particularly General Motors, are particularly interested in these devices that might radically change their industry.

The chemistry of these batteries, particularly the cathodes, is discussed in the book, but not deeply. It is not a textbook on electrochemistry. It is instead a book on the business and politics of an uncertain technological development that has the potential to alter the economic and environmental condition of the world.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Levine, Steve. The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World. New York: Viking, 2015.

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead, 2008.


Joseph Priestly was a man of contradictions. He was an inventive scientist, one of the fathers of chemistry, who somehow clung to an ancient idea his own research undermined. He had the courage to be a heretic, but held on to religious beliefs when many of his peers embraced atheism. He was a proponent of political liberty and the American cause whose views brought him trouble even in America.
Johnson’s Invention of Air is partly a biography of Priestly. It is also an attempt to see how revolutions in ideas occur. Priestly was connected to the scientific, religious and political revolutions of the Enlightenment. As one man’s involvement in all of them suggests, they were not completely separate, nor did the intellectual leaders of the time see them as discreet.

As a biography, the book works well. The sections shift emphasis from science to religion to politics. Though Priestly was a professional clergyman and ostensibly amateur scientist most of his life, Johnson’s framework works well chronologically because of his subject’s shifting emphasis.

Johnson doesn’t hit on a new theory of idea revolutions. He suggests the outlines of one, or maybe the method of discovering it. He finds in Priestly the beginnings of a systems approach to knowledge, especially science, that crosses disciplines and switches from small-scale to large-scale and back again. The model is modern ecological and systems science, which Johnson finds rooted in the coffeehouse meetings of Enlightenment amateurs who the many areas of human knowledge and endeavor as connected and amenable to improvement through reason.

I’m not a great fan of Enlightenment thinking, but I admire that they were serious and that they saw that truth in one realm (science, religion or politics) had ramifications in others. People seem willing to throw up walls and throw up their hands just to avoid the difficulties of struggling with all these things. Science wants to be unfettered from political and religious restrictions, but only thrives in stable and free (political) environments where people see the material world as worthy of study (an essentially religious view). The political freedom we long for needs support from good and available knowledge (science) and institutions that support individual self-government (religion). Religion in particular is walled off from other areas, but scientists and politicians have too readily shrugged off ethics that were based on human sentiment, when they were accountable to no one because no one was stronger.

Stephen Johnson also wrote The Ghost Map.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison
The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra
Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

As I get older, I start noticing some strange connections. If Peter Parker aged naturally, he’d be the same age as my father. I also learned that Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders (one of my favorite bands), is only three years younger than my parents. I can hardly believe it, though there is an unreliable part of my mind that seems convinced that I’m still in my early 20s.

This bit about Hynde’s age is hardly the most interesting thing in her autobiography, Reckless. You find many things you normally find in autobiographies. For instance, her early childhood in Ohio was surprisingly and pleasantly normal.

Things get more interesting in her teen years. She became a teenager in the 1960s and she was swept up into the youth culture of the time. She had two loves, music and drugs.

Hynde did a lot of drugs. She doesn’t dwell on the term addiction, but she doesn’t hide that she clearly was addicted. She subjected to herself to may dangers and abuses for the sake of getting high. A person would not do that if she was thinking straight, but addicts don’t think straight.

Unfortunately, drugs got in the way of the music. Drugs took the lives of many innovative musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and Hynde mentions many of them that she knew. Two members of the Pretenders, Jimmy Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug-related causes. It seems that there are several occasions in her story, before the Pretenders, when her dream of being in a band was interrupted by drugs, either her own pursuit of them or her potential bandmates’.

Hynde was adventurous. She traveled far from her childhood home in Akron to Canada, Mexico and France before settling in London. London became her home, largely because of the music scene. There she finally put together a band, though an unusual British band with an American lead. She met an amazing number of other musicians, famous then or later, who were there. It may seem like name dropping to discuss the Clash or the Sex Pistols, but these were people she knew and she lived their ups and downs with them.

The final section of the book, covering the career of the Pretenders, is surprisingly short. Admittedly, the original line-up did not last long due to the deaths of Scott and Farndon.

Hynde’s tone is not nostalgic. She has nostalgia for a Midwestern urbanism that was almost dead by the time she came along. She speaks frankly about her own days. She expresses a strong sense of agency and does not blame anyone for the way they treated her or depict herself as a victim. She seems to regret that the drugs people thought would set them free did not, and that as addicts they kept using drugs long after they knew it was a trap.

If you’re interested in rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and punk), you’ll likely enjoy this book. Hynde clearly loves this music and was around when it was undergoing much innovation. She was friends with some of the first stars of punk. He story is also an interesting section of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, she was a student at Kent State University and witnessed the protests and other events that led to the National Guard firing on students.

If you’r interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hynde, Chrissie. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

Circles by James Burke

Circles is a collection of essays that science journalist James Burke wrote for Scientific American. These 50 short histories focus on science and technology, as you might expect from the magazine that originally published them. Burke also covers culture and literature, which are inextricably tangled in those other subjects anyway.

The conceit of these essays is that they start and end at more or less the same place, making a circle. These trips through history, like history itself, are hardly tidy little circles. Burke skips from place to place, person to person, and period to period like a mad time traveler. The jumps are not random, each step has a connection to its predecessor, eventually finding a connection back to the starting point. Even so, the effect is sometimes chaotic.

I think Burke wanted to convey something of the chaos of history. It is easy to look at the history of some bit of science or technology and see it as a clearly delineated arc. We make superhighways from early concept to full-fledged idea and fly by everything else without noticing it. Burke takes the scenic route, noting the oddball side trips and serendipitous stumbles that are the typical milestones of our creeping advancement in knowledge.

The approach doesn’t allow Burke to dive deep into any subject, but that is not what he wanted to do. That is why I would recommend it to other amateur historians. You can play the honeybee with Burke, flitting from flower to flower and sipping the nectar of each. Along the way you are likely something that intrigues you. You could start a historical journey of your own.

James Burke also wrote The Pinball Effect.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Majestie by David Teems

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Burke, James. Circles: 50 Round Trips through History, Technology, Science, Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

New & Interesting Stuff Halloween 2015

An Endless Sediment Story: The First Five Decades of the Canal de Marseille

Energy & Transportation Update

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

400-year-old church re-emerges from beneath Mexican reservoir

The hydraulic telegraph of Aeneas – long-distance communication of antiquity

Infrastructure & Environment News

New & Interesting Stuff Sept. 20, 2015

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Reading Like a Writer by the Aptly Named Francine Prose

Prose, Francine.  Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.  New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Reading Like a Writer is different than the other books about reading that I’ve read so far.  Francine Prose doesn’t discuss judging what you read, but learning from it.  She wants readers, like herself and the aspiring writers she teaches, to look at how great writers accomplish what they do.  In that sense it is as much a book about writing as it is about literary criticism.

The book is organized with writing in mind.  Prose covers topics that are of interest to writers of fiction: words, sentences, paragraphs, narrative, character, dialogue, details and gesture.  In each chapter she discusses these issues using examples from works of classic literature.  I confess that I’ve read very few of the books she references, but she provides enough of a quotation or explanation that you don’t need to have read the book to follow her illustrations.  You don’t need to have a degree in literature to follow; this book might serve as an introduction to some classic literature.

The method Prose proposes is close reading.  This is slow, attentive reading.  It can be very purposeful, such as seeking out every time an author uses a particular word or concept.  Of course, to read with such a particular purpose in mind suggest you or someone else has already done a close reading with a more general purpose of paying attention and noticing how the book affects you and how the author accomplishes those effects.

Close reading is not intended to be a dry and analytical.  Books can be enjoyable, moving and fun.  If a fiction book doesn’t have some emotional impact on you, even if simply the pleasure of entertainment, then why would you bother to read it?  Close reading includes taking in the beauty of a story and the words used to express it.  You may not want to approach every book this way, but great books are worth the time and effort.

This book might be interesting to the critic or reviewer, professional or amateur.  I think it will be more interesting to aspiring writers who want to learn from the masters.  Prose has several masters to recommend and an approach to setting at their feet as they teach.  She won’t tell you how to write.  As much as there may be rules to writing there are examples of great writers who have bent or broken them. Reading Like a Writer may help you discover how writers did it well and hopefully you’ll continue that course on your own.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

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The Thin Man (Film)

The Thin Man. Writ. Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. Dir. W. S. Van Dyke. With William Powell and Myrna Loy. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1934.

This film is based on the excellent Dashiell Hammett book of the same title. It was so popular MGM made five sequels from 1936 to 1947: After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home and Song of the Thin Man. The writers changed, but most of the films were directed by W. S. Van Dyke and all of them starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as the charming couple, Nick and Nora Charles.

It is the charm of the Charles’ that makes the movies such a pleasure to watch. The characters have great chemistry Hammett’s book; Powell and Loy bring it to the screen. Part of their charm comes from their witty banter. I think part of it comes from the happy marriage of the couple. They delight in each other, tolerate each other’s weaknesses and gently push each other to be better. And though they fit traditional gender roles, as you would expect at the time the films were made, and it is clear that Nick is a professional detective and Nora an amateur, they seem more equal than most fictional couples in today’s films and television.



As a series, the films handle the couple in another unusual way. They age. They age naturally. In the first pair if films, as in the book, Nora is a young heiress and Nick older and worldlier. In the middle pair of films, they’re parents of a young son. By the last film, they’re an established couple and even Nora can’t follow the slang of the hipster characters.

The chemistry between Powell and Loy is great. Some other quality actors appear in the films as well, like Maureen O’Sullivan in The Thin Man. The sequels include performances from James Stewart and Keenan Wynn. Some uncredited (and not as great) appearances include Shemp Howard and a guy who I think might be Tor Johnson.

The crime solving in The Thin Man sticks close to the book, but adapted to work well on film. As crime stories, the sequels vary in quality, complexity and suspense. If you’re looking for a great mystery, you may want to look elsewhere. Crime solving is the backbone of the plots of these films, but the plots are largely an excuse to watch Nick and Nora do their thing.

(Thanks, Roger, for loaning me the box set of these films on DVD.)

The Society for Useful Knowledge by Jonathan Lyons

Colonial America was a place that demanded much of settlers. While many appreciated the value of book learning, many came to America because of their strong opinions about a particular book, their new home required them to focus on practical knowledge for developing land, repairing hard-to-get goods and getting the most out of one’s one labor. In The Society for Useful Knowledge, Jonathan Lyons explores this emphasis on utility and its influence on colonial science and the revolutionary generation.

Ben Franklin is the most significant figure discussed by Lyon. He developed an appreciation early in life for the value of skilled labor, he was a printer himself, and he maintained this even as he became America’s most famous scientist and the new nation’s representative in Europe. Franklin’s influence in the American scientific community was huge even though he spent years in Europe; his connections to European scientists were part of the reason for his influence at home.

Franklin and his compatriots saw a great value in encouraging and disseminating useful information in science and engineering, especially if it might increase the productivity of American agriculture and manufacturing. Franklin founded one of the earliest scientific societies in the colonies and it eventually had many imitators. He also supported the establishment of what eventually became the University of Pennsylvania, though he broke with the other organizers when his emphasis on utility conflicted with their desire to provide an education focused on classical languages in the European mold.

Though Franklin was not trying to establish institutions that would lead to the revolution, he and many who worked with him did it anyway. Franklin and his Quaker neighbors preferred education in useful knowledge and trades. Many colonial scientists were self-taught and learned on their farms and workshops. They saw little value in the classical education popular in Europe that distinguished the aristocracy and upper class from others, but did little in their minds to suit a person for a role of value in the community. Americans needed to get stuff done and they didn’t care much about a person’s pedigree. This opened up opportunities for people of low social status to grow in wealth and influence. (Even in Europe, amateur scientists from many classes were common and it especially leveled the social ground around England’s coffeehouses.)

Franklin’s circle of mechanics and part-time scientists influenced the generation that followed them. Franklin’s personal reputation allowed him to be a leader in that generation who became the founders of the United States. The emphasis on practicality and experience, with the accompanying devaluing of ancient authorities in dead languages, influenced American political thought as well as its science, technology and education. The connections he made as a postmaster and scientific communicator also formed a model for the political influencers of his time.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

46 Pages by Scott Liell

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Lyons, Jonathan. The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and His Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. It is also in important part of the small, light, energy-packed rechargeable batteries that make our portable devices possible. It is also likely an important part of future batteries that might make longer-running electric cars and large-scale energy storage possible. Journalist Seth Fletcher describes the history of lithium as a battery material, especially in batteries for electric and hybrid cars, in Bottled Lightning.

Fletcher goes way back to the batteries made by Alessandro Volta in 1800 and, possibly more important, the first rechargeable batteries made by Gaston Planté in 1859 (a lead acid battery).

Fletcher treats this older history briefly. Like his readers, he is not as interested in batteries as in the uses of energy batteries enable. One of these uses is transportation. Many early cars were electric vehicles (EVs) that were powered by batteries. The technology of the time required large batters to hold relatively modest charges, which limited the range of the cars. Gasoline held much more energy than batteries, was widely available and cheap. For most motorists, gasoline beat batteries hands down.

Of course, priorities and technologies change. The energy crisis of the 1970s, along with a growing environmental movement, pressured automakers to develop electric car concepts. The technology of the time probably wasn’t up to the task for what most drivers wanted, and in combination with a return of low oil prices and automotive industry inertia the electric car development of that era came to an end.

Technology rolled on, as it does, and the development of cell phones—and the portable, networked computers they have become—put pressure on the battery industry to come up with lighter, longer lasting, rechargeable batteries. They found the answer in lithium-based batteries, especially the lithium-ion type that is common today.

When the automakers were again needing to look at alternatives to oil, mostly for fuel economy and emission control reasons, the new lithium-ion batteries changed the equation for the effectiveness and affordability of electric and hybrid cars. It is yet to become cheap, as attested by the price of the high-end electric cars made by Tesla. Even cars marketed for the mass market like the Chevy Volt is expensive without subsidies. (The Volt is technically a plug-in hybrid, but for the majority of drivers who travel less than forty miles a day it can be all-electric.)

There is a lot of potential for advance batteries becoming the industrial driver of the future. A growing electric car market will create a demand for a lot of batteries. The increased uses of renewable energy, and the eventual retirement of coal-burning and other fuel-consuming power plants, depends on energy storage to even out the waxing and waning of energy sources that vary with the cycles of the sun and the whims of the weather. The 2009 stimulus bill put a lot of money into new battery research and manufacturing, but Asia is still ahead of the U.S. in manufacturing capacity if not in innovation. If America wants a piece of this revolution (we’re going to buy a lot of these batteries, so maybe we should reap some of the benefits of making them), we’ll need to invest in these industries (as China is) and not leave to Asian manufacturers to lengthen their lead.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Fletcher, Seth. Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cards, and the New Lithium Economy. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Moore, Graham. The Sherlockian. New York: Twelve, 2010.

In The Sherlockian, Graham Moore tells two stories, both crime tales that are linked by a missing diary. In the modern story, a newly inducted member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a prominent group of Sherlock Holmes fan-scholars, sets out to solve a murder that occurs at a convention of the Irregulars. Seeking the solution to this mystery leads him to another, the attempt to find a lost diary of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes.

The second story is historical. It features Doyle and his friend Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Doyle similarly starts out to solve one mystery and gets draw into another. He sets out to discover who sent him a letter bomb that actually contains a letter, though Doyle narrowly escapes death from the bomb. It leads him into seeking the killer of young women who are joined by radical politics and an odd tattoo.

The first track reads as much like a suspense-thriller than a mystery, though the hero is decidedly nerdier than is typical of such stories, as you might expect of a guy who has had is head buried in books for years. The Doyle story begins as something similar to the stories the actual man wrote to showcase his famous character, the fictional detective
he killed to be rid of then brought back to life. It becomes more realistic at progress, or at least much messier.

Though mostly serious in tone, the book has humorous moments. The hero is a guy who has found a way to make a living from having read a ton of books. His chief credential as a detective is that he knows a lot about Sherlock Holmes. He’s not the only Sherlockian to involve himself in the case; he is simply more competent and lucky than the others.



The historical touches are interesting. The real Doyle consulted with Scotland Yard, with varying success, though the crime described in The Sherlockian is fictional. Some of his papers, including a diary, disappeared after his death and resurfaced more than 70 years later in the hands of a distant Doyle relative. A battle of words and lawyers ensued involving the would-be seller of these documents, the Doyle heirs, and a prominent Irregular. The Irregular died under suspicious circumstances and the case is still considered unsolved in spite of the efforts of police and many amateur detectives. These real events inspired the book, though the author clearly distinguishes in a short note the touch of history from the mass of fiction.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
The Great Stink by Clare Clark