I’m reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity got created and how deals went down.
Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT get back to the moon again", "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important events.
It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time.
The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_In...
In 1893, Fridjtof Nansen set sail in the Fram, a ship specially designed and built to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel with the sea’s drift closer to the North Pole than anyone had ever gone before. Experts said such a ship couldn't be built and that the voyage was tantamount to suicide.
This brilliant first-person account, originally published in 1897, marks the beginning of the modern age of exploration. Nansen vividly describes the dangerous voyage and his 15-month-long dash to the North Pole by sledge. Farthest North is an unforgettable tale and a must-read for any armchair explorer.
If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything:
1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do it for them. Don’t be some worthless pretender. Know your shit from experience so you can execute with confidence.
2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You will know it when you have it because it’s highly durable and requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid foundation isn’t a thing you sell. It’s your baseline for doing everything else at low cost.
3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don’t have to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are quick to cry about how something can’t be done. Fuck those guys and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get done.
4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you were. If you aren’t intimately aware of your performance in numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren’t more special than anyone else.
People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those because they didn’t get stuck. They had the proper tools in place to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation), objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know how much to tweak it moving forward.
Details, among other things, the engineering challenges faced during the development of the F-117 Nighthawk and the SR-71 Blackbird.
Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage
This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed.
How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512
This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies.
The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b...
This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning
Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.
Showstopper - Windows NT
Losing the Signal - BlackBerry
Made in Japan - Sony
Piloting Palm - Palm
Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint
Folklore.org - Early Apple.
The “Mac Folklore Radio Podcast” [0]. Has a few interesting stories of people innovating and solving challenges.
Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the early days of the Internet [2].
[1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
[2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet:
https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...
I haven't read all of it (~900 pages), but he seems like an honest man, humble with minimal ego, who doesn't sugarcoat the challenges of building a business from scratch as a non-business guy. He also includes internal memos and the like, so you do get a feel for the "mechanics" of company-building.
- someone who got lucky
- someone who invested an unfathomable amount of time to their craftsmanship or to their beliefs
Of course it is not black and white, and even luck mostly requires hard work in the first place, which I admire (and if you find your luck - hold to it!, nothing wrong with that), but you get the gist. I guess that in other words what I am saying is: beware of the survivorship bias on the left side of this spectrum.
--
Finally, the book: "The story of my experiments with Truth", Ghandi. Definitely belongs to the "work hard" extremity and a very interesting read; but I don't want to create an impression that I find it special in any way because of my above comment, it is just one of the latest I have read, consider the two comments unrelated.
Gamasutra used to offer these amazing post mortems written up by game developers after shipping a product. Often recounting all their failures and how they still shipped.
It details Alexander von Humboldt, his travels through South America and Siberia, and general contributions to science.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995249-the-invention-o...
for a short video version of this history, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium.
reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
Covers the invention of radar, "big science", involvement in the Manhattan project.
https://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp...
"Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (inventor of instant photography and founder of Polarioid)"
Probably one of the most brilliant commercial technology breakthroughs largely attributable to a single team and a singular vision. Steve Jobs' hero.
https://www.amazon.com/Insisting-Impossible-Life-Edwin-Land/...
Few people understand the Punic wars and what it took to “delete” Carthage from the world. Delenda Cartago Est.
Goldsworthy tells the story accessibly from both sides of the wars. Lessons that echo throughout history.
More of a biography but still fits your criteria is The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. It’s an easy read and hard to put down. I had no idea what it took to make flying a thing until that book. We definitely take for granted how much those two men changed the world.
(Note: the hero of the story went a little crazy in recent years. Hid from the law for a long time, and I think he just died... but still, the book itself is amazing.)
This is an incredibly long biography of a man who figured out how to build an urban empire. While he wasn't an "entrepreneur" per se, he figured out how to generate huge amounts of revenue via tolls/bridges, how to manage and manipulate public policy, and how to attract the best urban planning talent.
... and you can then read about how it all fell apart.
Regardless of your opinion on Robert Moses / NYC, it's an incredibly fascinating read or (~90-hour) audio book.
It sounds like you want second hand accounts of the events or groups that occurred around "hard things". Like a description of NASA going to the moon, but not the accounts of a particular astronaut.
What is a "hard thing"?
It is a history of Land and Polaroid, together with a detailed, insider's view of the long-running litigation between Polaroid and Kodak (the author worked at the firm which represented Polaroid on the case).
One of the things I found most interesting was just how much Steve Jobs was inspired by and copied Edwin Land.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/574979/changing-how-...
How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the highest level in the world for more than 30 years?
"The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop since then. No other video-game player has ever been so consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or Capcom Cup titles, but he has always stayed at the top. And he's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37.
Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a very short book.
Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from.
Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week.
Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting book.
During WWI he was sent from the UK to the Arabs to find a leader who could unite them and lead a rebellion against the Turks, who were allied with Germany.
He succeeded.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
"The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun - Not exactly about how hard things got done, but it discusses some of the misconceptions and assumptions we make about current technology and the process of inventing new tech.
He became an orphan at age 9.
Started working in factories at 14.
Started working in glasses factories at 16.
He built his own first at 27. Grew it from 0 to 6,000 employees.
Died while still being the CEO of the company aged 86 years old.
One of the best stories of perseverance, and doing hard things from nothing I've ever witnessed!
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61327449-how-big-thin... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921647-built [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59696349-build
"A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "
A biography of one of the most innovative mathematicians of all time traces the rise of Srinivasa Ramanujan from his days as a clerk to his collaboration with one of England's greatest mathematicians
There is also a movie with this same name. It was good, IMHO.
This book describes how hundreds of people tried (and failed) to cure cancer over *millennia*. It spends a lot of time talking about how the modern approach, which works surprisingly well, was developed by Sidney Farber and others through great effort and a lot of good science.
My feeling when reading this book was similar to reading about the making of the atomic bomb- what happens when you put a bunch of smart people in a box and tell them to solve a problem. However, this time it didn't work nearly as well, because as we found out, curing cancer is an order of magnitude harder than building an atomic bomb. Building the bomb required new engineering, while curing cancer requires new science and new engineering.
The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage.
Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf...
Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great recoinage crisis.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code
I didn’t love the writing, but thought Skunkworks was full of good stories.
It is a little more character study but Dealers of Lightning is a good one.
I also enjoyed The Idea Factory.
And last, a little off the path of making things but Endurance was a good read.
I would say “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold” would be a fitting match.
The history to get to absolut zero kelvin would fit your description.
In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences in public health and details the remarkable program that involved people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single objective―eliminating smallpox forever.
Henry SF Cooper, _The Evening Star_ (debugging OS race conditions on a Venus orbiter)
Pascal Zachary, _Showstopper_ (about David Cutler and Windows NT)
Richard Preston, _American Steel_ (building an early continuous casting steel mill in the midwest)
Very well written as well
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67672/67672-h/67672-h.htm
I'm really curious how that is considered public domain, it was published in 1943 and he died in 1959.
Anyway, one of the things most fascinating to me was their attempts to sell an airplane to the US army and other business related things. You'd think inventing the airplane would bring quick financial rewards but it was a long road.
the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was likeIt is based on ~20 years of research about Robert Oppenheimer, and is the inspiration for the movie Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer is the scientist who lead the development of the first atomic bomb.
> Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
In this case, the "people and character studies" are very critical to understanding "the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like". The early part of the book goes in depth to Oppenheimer's social ties to communist groups, which is critical to understanding the reason why he was forbidden from continuing research in the latter part of his life.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-O...
(To make a long story short, the American Communists, and their sympathizers, in the 1930s were blissfully unaware that the Soviet Union was an authoritarian hellhole. Many of the people involved in the Manhattan project had ties to those American Communists, and thus scientists in the Soviet Union. Because, for them, the Manhattan project was an academic endeavor, they wanted to share their results with their Soviet collogues. And that's how the nuclear race started... Information was leaked to the Soviets in the name of science. Oppenheimer was a victim of the resulting witch hunt; which requires understanding the "people and character studies" part of the book.)
The Man Who Discovered Quality by Andrea Gabor is an interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical approaches to reducing variance.
Issac Newton by James Gleick conveys what it was like for Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-scientific world.
Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together to build an amazing product and… basically failing.
My favorite book of this type by far.
A gripping read. 10/10 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/09/madhouse-at-th...
Amazing book about the grain markets and how they have changed over the last 40 years.
"Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will contain something bought, stored, transported, processed, shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the agricultural supply chain. The media often refers to them as the ABCD group of international grain-trading companies, with ABCD standing for ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus. The acronym, though, ignores the other three giants of the food supply: Glencore, COFCO International and Wilmar. Together, they handle 50 percent of the international trade in grain and oilseeds. In this book’s series of exclusive and unprecedented interviews, CEOs and senior traders from these seven giants describe in their own words how the agricultural markets are changing, and how they are adapting to those changes."
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket By Benjamin Lorr https://shepherd.com/book/the-secret-life-of-groceries
Five years of research really explains large swaths of our food system and how it changes what we eat.
You might like these as well:
The best unexpectedly enthralling books about seemingly boring things https://shepherd.com/best-books/good-books-about-seemingly-b...
The best books that make sense of how globalization broke down, and what happens next https://shepherd.com/best-books/globalization-breaks-down-wh...
*Features The Big Rig, a book about the American trucking industry and it's breakdown
Some good ones in there :)
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/across-the-airless-wi...
He also wrote a book on the interstate highway system called The Big Roads which was interesting but not as much of a page turner.
* https://dangardner.ca/publication/how-big-things-get-done
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-...
The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hürter
It’s about the minds who redefined our understanding of the universe, and I would say they were people who did a hard thing or two.
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL37331178M/Age_of_Uncertainty
It might not seem analogous, but there's a lot of parallels, i.e. you have limited air (aka runway), you need to choose the people on your expedition wisely and can't bring too many, you need to be extremely ambitious (seeking more than just touristy diving), etc.
The writing is incredible, too.
amazon link:: https://www.amazon.in/Simply-Fly-Odyssey-Captain-Gopinath/dp...
he created the low cost airline in India. There is a movie also based on his life - Sarfira ( starring Akshay Kumar)
I’ve had a few aha moments while reading this book. Although it's primarily written from an investor's perspective, it does contain a fair share of insight about creation and commercialisation of technology, the mechanics of monopolies, government involvement, foreign affairs, etc.
I'm quite aware of survivorship bias, and it is a theme I had thought about but wasn't sure how to frame in terms of individual stories.
Prior to reading this book, I naively assumed Cortes waltzed into Meso America and took over, this is a well sourced historical account of everything that happened that led to the fall of Tenochtitlan.
The best autobiography I've ever read in terms of nuggets of wisdom is Sam Walton's made in America autobiography.
An amazing biography. The perseverance and meticulousness with Mendel performed the experiments is very inspiring. He was not the typical gifted/talented student either. He would face many difficulties at school as well as while trying to be a priest.
Patrick Collison (of stripe fame) put together a collection of historical ambitious projects that got done quickly, look into the biographies of people mentioned in there. https://patrickcollison.com/fast
It was great read until he leaves Microsoft.
None of this hagiographic bollocks.
- The making of the Atomic bomb
- The Eighth Day of creation
These guys went through quite some hardships to define the length of a meter. Good read!
Story of the survivors of a sunken whale ship after a sperm whale attack. A source of inspiration for Moby Dick.
Describes how Maurice Hilleman invented 40 vaccines, including for eight of the most common diseases in the US, over a 36 year career at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Merck & Co. His vaccines are estimated to save 8 million lives each year.
in the fiction realm i think the martian fits the bill too!
> a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, from ancient gamblers in Greece to modern chaos theory.
In some parts it's not an easy read, but the underlying stories are very interesting.
Good to Great. Built to Last, etc.
Focuses on how the organizations are constructed and tries to divine principles that are true across time.
It’s interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all sorts of important ways in the history of computing.
- A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
American Steel, about how a small steel fabricator took over the US steel industry.
Think, the story of the Watsons and IBM, about how IBM went from a maker of time clocks to the biggest name in computing.
The Art of the Comeback, by Trump. This is the Trump book few read. Copies are around US$200 now. Written when Trump was down, it's more honest than his other book.
Some things that were famously hard to develop:
- Xerography. First demo in 1939, started to work around 1959, became a simple technology in the 1980s.
- Television. First attempts in the 19th century, sort of worked by the 1930s, worked decently by the 1950s, worked well as digital HDTV in the late 1980s, and achieved really good and really cheap only in the last few years.
- Steel. Goes back to ancient times. Not produced in quantity until the 1880s. Took about 10,000 tries to get the metallurgy for the Bessemer process right. Turns out you need analytical chemistry to make consistently good steel. Otherwise yield is poor. Many batches come out bad.
- Magnetic resonance imaging. The guy who invented it was almost fired for wasting time.
- Home grocery delivery. Check out why Webvan failed but Amazon succeeded. Some of the same people.
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3648638-the-biography-of...
c.f.,
_Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting_ by Richard L Hopkins
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17140645-tolbert-lanston...
For background on how difficult/apparently impossible this was, see the story of Mark Twain's investment in a typesetting machine:
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cymach6.html
One of the more memorably moments of my life was visiting a local newspaper back when they were still setting type using a Linotype machine --- it's just incredible to watch one (or the competing Monotype) work.
If I could, I'd have a Monotype machine in my shop along with a printing press, but first I'd need a shop, rather than a workbench at one end of the basement laundry room...
It's my understanding that for a long while, the U.S. Patent Office refused to consider patents for intermittent windshield wiping mechanisms because none of them worked --- the actual story of the invention is far more sordid:
https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns
For us folks interested in computers, there is of course Charles Babbage who tried and failed, yet still managed to create many of the concepts underlying our modern computing devices.
While the story of a team, Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ is a classic which I would highly recommend:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_Ne...
and for a more recent spin on things, look at the folks who crashed and burned such as Jerry Kaplan:
Actual science-based data about good leadership.
When the heavens went on sale, by Ashly Vance, is pretty good. It details the early days of the space start-ups other than spaceX
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley is also pretty good, describes the crazy days of early paypal.
Someone already mentioned Liftoff by Erig Berger. Starting a private space company is probably as hard as things get, and it describes the early days pretty well
Describes how British cryptanalysts and engineers built the first vacuum-tube digital computer[1] to break the cipher[2] the Nazis were using for strategic communications.
[0] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/colossus-97801995781...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_ci...
It’s been one of the books that surprised me the most. It totally changed my opinion of the man.
When the Americans finally stepped in 15 years later, they too made the mistake of appointing bureaucrats to run the project. The result was a shambles. Eventually President Roosevelt simply ignored Congress and appointed an individual to run the project. He was a railroad engineer named Stevens. Stevens was the first to realize that the real logistical problem to solve was not actually digging up the dirt, but disposing of it. The French had famously used steam shovels to dig the canal as fast as possible, just as they had in Suez. But once the dirt was loaded into train cars and carted away from the dig site, they used teams of men with shovels to empty them. Stevens calculated how fast the dirt would need to be loaded and unloaded, and set up a system of trains that could carry any quantity of dirt any distance, while loading as quickly as possible at the dig site and unloading it just as quickly at the dump site. Once he knew the numbers and had the system built, he could track exactly how quickly each train was unloaded and know which teams were working efficiently and which needed training to avoid falling behind.
Another good one by the same author is _The Wright Brothers_. It’s shorter and perhaps not as detailed as _The Path Between the Seas_ (but then it only took them 4 years while the canal needed 33), but it focuses on the actual tasks undertaken by the Wrights as they developed their first few airplanes. They first used gliders to test their wings and the control mechanisms. Then they built a wind tunnel to get accurate data about the lift and drag of a wing under specific circumstances. Then they built an engine lighter than any in use at the time. They designed their own propellers too, since nobody they talked to knew how to design one. Even for boats, the engineers who designed them just used heuristics and guesses and rules of thumb rather than any scientific processes in their work. The first few propeller shafts that they built turned out not to be strong enough and were destroyed. But they were methodical and driven, so they solved each problem one at a time until they had both a working airplane and a working knowledge of how to fly it.
Book about Dan Colussy, who somehow managed to rescue Iridium satellite network when it was weeks away from bankruptcy and being deliberately crashed into the ocean.
It's a great reality check, poking into human nature, morality, suffering, all with real life examples and littlz tolerance for bullshit without delusion of grandeur.
1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.
2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.
3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.
4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.
5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.
6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.
7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.
9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.
10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.
11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.
12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.
13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.
14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.
15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.
16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.
17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.
18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.
19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.
20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.
21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.
22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.
24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.
25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.
26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.
27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.
28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.
29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.
30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.
31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.
32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.
33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.
34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.
35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.
36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.
37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.
38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.
39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.
40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.
41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.
42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.
43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.
45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.
46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.
47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.
48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.
49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.
50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
These two things are inseparable.