The Age of Invention

The American inventors from Whitney and Fulton to Bell and Edison, told as a chain in which each machine makes the next one necessary — the gin, the reaper, the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light. Holland Thompson wrote it for the Chronicles of America series just as the automobile was ending the world he describes. He is good on the patent fights, which is where most of these stories actually happened. Sixty plates of American landscape and invention-era painting, including works by Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand, follow the text and give the machine age its native scenery.