Tom Standage 's books
A Edible History of Humanity
By Tom Standage
Throughout history, food has acted as a catalyst of social change, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict, and economic expansion. An Edible History of Humanity is a pithy, entertaining account of how a series of changes---caused, enabled, or influenced by food---has helped to shape and transform societies around the world.
A History Of The World In Six Glasses
By Tom Standage
As the tides of history have ebbed and flowed, different drinks have come to prominence in different times, places and cultures, from stone-age villages to Ancient Greek dining rooms or Enlightenment coffeehouses. Each one became popular when it met a particular need or aligned with a historical trend: in some cases, it then went on to influence the course of history in unexpected ways. Just as archaeologists divide history into different periods based on the use of different materials — the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, and so on — it is also possible divide world history into periods dominated by different drinks. Six drinks in particular — beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola — chart the flow of world history. Three contain alcohol and three contain caffeine, but what they all have in common is that each drink was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day.
THE MECHANICAL TURK:
The True Story of the Chess-playing Machine That Fooled the World
By Tom Standage
On an autumn day in 1769, a Hungarian nobleman, Wolfgang von Kempelen, was summoned to witness a conjuring show at the imperial court of Maria Theresa, empress of Austria-Hungary. So unimpressed was Kempelen by what he saw that he impetuously declared that he could do better himself. Very well, said the empress, and gave him six months to deliver on his promise. The following year Kempelen unveiled an extraordinary contraption: a mechanical man seated behind a wooden cabinet. The Turk, as it became known, was fashioned from wood, powered by clockwork, and dressed in a stylish Turkish costume. Most astonishing of all, it was capable of playing chess. But how did it work? A torrent of pamphlets, books and articles followed the Turk wherever it went. Was it controlled by a dwarf, a monkey, or a legless war veteran lurking in its innards? Was it an elaborate form of puppet, or controlled by magnets? Or had Kempelen succeeded in building a thinking machine?
The Neptune File: Planet Detectives and the Discovery of Worlds Unseen
By Tom StandageThe Neptune File is the tale of the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846 as a result of mathematical analysis of the anomalous motion of the planet Uranus. The book tells the story of the rival mathematicians who predicted Neptune’s existence, and the ensuing race to identify it in the skies. The discovery caused an international sensation and spawned a controversy that has continued to rumble ever since. Many of the key documents relating to the discovery, which were bound into a scrapbook by the English Astronomer Royal, George Airy, went missing after the second world war and were only recovered last year from a horde of documents found in Chile. This scrapbook, the Neptune File, is the primary source for my book, which is the most detailed account yet published of the Neptune affair.
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers
By Tom Standage
My first book, The Victorian Internet, was published in 1998 in Britain and North America (and has since been published in translation in Germany and South Korea). It points out the features common to the telegraph networks of the nineteenth century and the internet of today: hype, scepticism, hackers, on-line romances and weddings, chat-rooms, flame wars, information overload, predictions of imminent world peace, and so on. In the process, I get to make fun of the internet, by showing that even such a quintessentially modern technology actually has roots going back a long way (in this case, to a bunch of electrified monks in 1746). By and large, the book has aged well. Its deliberately retro subject-matter has given it a much longer shelf-life than most internet books, and it seems to have become, if anything, even more relevant since the dotcom crash. (It was reissued in September 2007, unchanged except for the addition of a new afterword.)