Alchemy and Life. How People and Materials Changed Each Other

The scientist and science popularizer Ainissa Ramirez presents eight inventions – clocks, steel tracks, copper communication cables, photographic film, electric lamps, hard drives, laboratory glassware, and silicon chips – and demonstrates how they influenced human experience. Ramirez tells the story of a woman who "sold time", an inventor who inspired Edison, and an enthusiastic entrepreneur whose discovery suggested a path to creating the computer.
Among other things, she describes how the pursuit of accuracy predetermined our sleep patterns, how railroads contributed to the commercialization of Christmas, how the forced brevity of telegrams affected Hemingway's literary style, and how a young chemist exposed the practice of using Polaroid cameras for passporting and racial segregation during apartheid in South Africa.