Weirdly attention-grabbing. What Witold Rybczynski did for the screwdriver, Owen does for the photocopier. (Photos and...
New Yorker staff writer Owen (The Making of the Masters, 1999, etc.) fluidly recounts the story of the “most successful product ever marketed in America.”
That’s according to Forbes, but Owen’s lapidary prose is far more pleasurable than that magazine’s breathless pages. Whether he’s explaining the rudiments of home improvement (The Walls Around Us, 1991) or the evolution of the copying machine, he makes the unlikeliest suspects into appealing tales. The action this time centers on Chester Carlson, son of grinding poverty and the visionary behind the photocopier, a nonintuitive idea if there ever was one. Though Owen makes it clear that there were a good handful of individuals who lent critical insights to the project, Carlson’s perseverance was particularly remarkable. Time and again, his invention was on the brink of oblivion, time and again he managed to secure funding or find a niche that the machine (ever in the process of refinement) could fill to sustain the work in progress. Along the way, Owen rolls out the evolution of the copying process, starting with Sumerian scribes, moving through monks and machines—intaglio, lithography, the hectograph, pantograph, and polygraph (Thomas Jefferson thought this last, an early copier, was indispensable to democracy)—to the critical discoveries of aniline dyes and a sort of proto-carbon paper that helped lead to the first xerographic copy in 1938. But no one wanted to join the young company as a partner in manufacturing, and RCA tried to make an end run around Xerox patents, though it got nowhere. The photocopying process is not a simple thing to understand; photoelectricity, a building block of the copier, is so arcane, for instance, that “Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for having explained it in 1905.” To Owen’s abiding credit, he makes it all intelligible in this rich business history.
Weirdly attention-grabbing. What Witold Rybczynski did for the screwdriver, Owen does for the photocopier. (Photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5117-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
A suspenseful, user-friendly account of Microsoft's five-year effort to develop Windows NT (for new technology). Wall Street Journal correspondent Zachary delineates the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to produce a breakthrough operating system that would not only work on all available personal computers but also allow customers to retain familiar applications programs. Throughout his accessible text, Zachary tries to keep readers in the loop. He provides illuminating reminders of how operating systems (which control a processor's basic functions) differ from applications software (the visible programs that retrieve information, maintain databases, prepare documents for printing, and otherwise satisfy human needs). While NT, which reached the marketplace last summer, has yet to achieve critical sales mass, the author leaves little doubt that the $150 million project yielded its creator a host of payoffs: by advancing the state of the networking art, defining the shape of software to come, and giving Microsoft (which last month settled potentially troublesome antitrust charges) an inside track on the interactive information highway. The bulk of the narrative is devoted to anecdotal reportage on how a consequential enterprise managed to harness its varied, volatile, very human resources (many of whom had become independently wealthy by cashing in options on the company's common stock) and meet the self-imposed schedule for NT's introduction. Covered as well are the time and technical tradeoffs made in the course of an undertaking whose final features included more compromises than indisputably correct answers. Nor does the author ignore the human costs of economic and scientific success in his reckoning of the NT balance sheet. An engrossing and instructive case history of programming under fire on the front lines of software technology. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-935671-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Useful, credible and smart.
A handy guide to personal finance and a convincing argument for improved financial literacy.
Secrets is a near-encyclopedic compilation of financial advice from Mincher, a self-made multimillionaire. (He made his first million by the age of 25.) And though much of his wisdom derives solely from his own experience, the seven-figure investment portfolio that backs it up is difficult to deny. In many ways, the story of how the author made his money is as interesting as the financial counsel he provides. A born businessman, he formed his first company in high school and won awards as a young entrepreneur. He earned his fortune as the owner of a charter-bus service and, later, as a regional telecom baron. Mincher offers brief chapters on just about every conceivable area of financial inquiry, from credit checks to buying a car to investing in the stock market. His volume works more effectively as a reference than a how-to to be read in a few sittings. But as such it is very valuable indeed; clearly organized and helpfully broken up into bite-size sections, the information is easy to digest. Underpinning it all is the author’s fervent belief that most people need to know more about their money. Mincher has an autodidact’s ambivalence toward traditional education; a college drop-out, he preaches “street smarts” and inveighs a bit too frequently against odd targets like high-school calculus in his introduction. Nonetheless, his call for more and better financial education rings true, especially as subprime lenders have recently wreaked havoc on world economic markets by preying on the financially non-savvy.
Useful, credible and smart.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9797003-0-9
Page Count: 426
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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