In a celebrated 1842 letter, American physicist Joseph Henry praised Samuel F. B. Morse's design for an electromagnetic telegraph. Henry wrote to Morse, in a letter meant to help Morse obtain congressional funding to build a demonstration line, that although there were other competing telegraph designs, “I should prefer the one invented by yourself.” Yet Henry also noted that “science is now fully ripe” for a telegraph and that the idea “would naturally arise in the mind of almost any person familiar with the phenomena of electricity.”

Henry's framework—that scientists discover and inventors merely apply those discoveries—remains the common way that the public understands the relationship between science and technology. Gavin Weightman reinforces this understanding. Although he acknowledges that the flash of genius—the “eureka moment”—is key to the act of invention, he (like Henry) contends that inventions are the culmination of the “discoveries and innovations” of those who came before, “so it can never be said that they are the work of a lone genius” (pp. viii–ix). In a manner reminiscent of James Burke's television show Connections, Weightman claims that “working backwards from the ‘eureka moment’ offers an intriguing perspective” on the histories of five inventions: the Wright brothers’ airplane, the early television, the bar code reader, the personal computer, and the mobile telephone (p. ix). For example, he contends that the Wright brothers succeeded in flying a crewed aircraft under its own power because of the earlier work of Sir George Cayley, Otto Lilienthal, Octave Chanute, and others. Similarly, Weightman claims that the mobile telephone's origins lay with Hans Christian Oersted's discovery of electromagnetism.

Weightman also stresses that outsiders—those creative souls with little or no background in science or technology—often make major breakthroughs. Among them, of course, were the Wright brothers, Samuel Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell. Specialists in aeronautics and electricity knew that crewed, powered flight and the transmission of the human voice over an electrical circuit were absurd impossibilities. The Wright brothers and Bell were unburdened with that knowledge. Indeed, Weightman concludes his book with a plea to make room in our history for the “dotty individualist” whose “dogged determination has sometimes defied the wisdom of the day and ushered in something magically new” (pp. 245–46).

None of Weightman's book is magically new to professional historians of technology or of capitalism. I trust that no reader of this review would contend that new technologies are the products of lone geniuses toiling away in isolation. And historians of technology (like David Hounshell) have for a generation examined the advantages and liabilities of being technological outsiders. Weightman's book thus contributes little to our understanding of the relationship between scientific research, technological innovation, and the commercialization of new technologies. Moreover, Weightman conducted very little primary research. His historical outlines of five technologies rely almost entirely on secondary sources along with a few published primary sources. As I read this book, I kept asking myself why a highly respected academic press would even publish it (except for the sales, of course).

Perhaps it is unfair to hold Weightman to standards of scholarly publication. He is not an academic historian nor claims to be. To be fair to the author, this book succeeds as a popular, nonacademic work. He is an engaging writer with an eye for telling detail. This book would make a great holiday or birthday gift for that friend or relative who asks, “So, what kind of history do you do?”