Human-Built World

"Thomas P. Hughes presents a wide-ranging yet deeply insightful view of technology and how its relationship to society and culture has changed over time. Readers of this book will benefit greatly from Hughes's informed and understanding perspective on what technology is and how it is perceived." - Henry Petroski, author of Small Things Considered; "Human-Built World offers a thoroughgoing, incisively rendered and engaging history of humanity's relationship to technology.... Although Hughes gives invention and engineering a central role in the creation of our world, the purpose of his sprightly polemic is to rail against technological determinism.... As technically based systems already invisibly govern so much of our daily lives and will continue to penetrate our culture still further, this is a timely and urgent book." - Adam Wishart, Times Literary Supplement; "Do we 'think' about technology? Probably not. It is the stuff that surrounds us. Yet even if we no longer wonder at the internet or mobile telephones, we worry about chemical weapons and human cloning. Indeed, as Thomas P. Hughes shows in this brilliantly concise history, people were arguing about the rights and wrongs of technology long before the term gained currency in the late 20th century." - Mark Archer, Financial Times"