San Antonio College Library

"Nikola Tesla invented the radio, robots, and remote control. His electric induction motors run our appliances and factories, yet he has been largely overlooked by history. In Tesla, Richard Munson presents a comprehensive portrait of this farsighted and underappreciated mastermind."--Publisher's description.

"This volume is the first fully illustrated book about Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) and the early years of the telephone - an invention that transformed the culture, social fabric, and economy of the United States and, eventually, the world. Hundreds of rare and previously unpublished images reveal early phone history, turn-of-the-century America, and the remarkable Bell family." "At the center of this book is Alexander Graham Bell himself, whose...

Despite being incredibly popular during his time, Nikola Tesla today remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of the modern era. Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the light bulb, but it was his one-time assistant and lifelong arch nemesis, Tesla, who made the breakthrough in alternating current technology. Edison and Tesla carried on a bitter feud for years, but it was Tesla's AC generators that...

A series of specific challenges led Eli Whitney to exercise his ingenuity in technology and made him an engineer. His cotton gin revolutionized Southern agriculture. And the problems of manufacturing large quantities of guns drove him to develop principles important in his own time, and even more important later. The application of those principles would one day give American industry the structure within which it more than fulfilled the ambitions...

"A late eighteenth-century technologist, [Fulton] believed in Research-and-Development a hundred and fifty years before the phrase itself was coined. This biography holds surprises for those who think of Fulton only as the inventor of the steamboat. He designed dozens of things, from marble-cutting machines to primitive submarines (which he called plungeboats) and torpedoes. Fulton did not, in fact, invent the steamboat at all- there were many versions...

Edison presents, in intimate detail, the man who helped engineer the modern world. One of history's most prolific inventors and perhaps America's first celebrity, Thomas Alva Edison did more than bring incandescent light into every household and industry; he created a world-renowned brand, raised capital to support research and business and pursued patents for his 1,000+ inventions. Leonard DeGraaf, archivist for the Thomas Edison National Historical...