Technology Biography

This audiobook tells the story of Henry Ford, along with his invention, the popular Model T automobile.

In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin's amazing life, from his days as a runaway printer to his triumphs as a statesman, scientist, and Founding Father. He chronicles Franklin's tumultuous relationship with his illegitimate son and grandson, his practical marriage, and his flirtations with the ladies of Paris. He also shows how Franklin helped to create the American character and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century.

Carl Jung was the founder of analytical psychology who revolutionized the way we approached the human psyche. Drawing on Eastern mysticism, mythology and dream analysis to develop his theories, Jung proposed many ideas which are still influential today, including introversion, extroversion and the collective unconscious.

Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.

Fascinated from an early age by the natural world in general and ants in particular, Edward Osborne Wilson's field work on them and on all social insects has vastly expanded our knowledge of their many species and fascinating ways of being. This work led to his 1975 book Sociobiology, which created an intellectual firestorm from his contention that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is governed by the laws of evolution and genetics. Subsequently, Wilson has become a leading voice on the crucial importance to all life of biodiversity.

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson led the design of such crucial aircraft as the P-38 and Constellation, but he will be more remembered for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. His extraordinary leadership of the Lockheed "Skunk Works" cemented his reputation as a legendary figure in American aerospace management.

This audiobook narrated by Juliet Stevenson shares the story of a world-renowned physicist who seeks gravity’s true nature and finds wisdom in embracing its force in her life.

From their early days as tutor and scholar, discussing philosophy over Spartan dinners, to their work together to publish Einstein’s books in Europe, in Maurice Solovine Einstein found both an engaged mind and a loyal friend. While Einstein frequently shared his observations on science, politics, philosophy, and religion in his correspondence with Solovine, he was just as likely to express his feelings about everyday life.

Astrophysicist and best-selling author Mario Livio draws on his own scientific expertise to provide captivating insights into how Galileo reached his bold new conclusions about the cosmos and the laws of nature. A freethinker who followed the evidence wherever it led him, Galileo was one of the most significant figures behind the scientific revolution. He believed that every educated person should know science as well as literature, and insisted on reaching the widest audience possible, publishing his books in Italian rather than Latin.

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards, and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen?

Thomas Edison wasn't just an inventor. He was also a physicist and businessman. Young listeners will discover how he became a great scientist whose inventions made a better life for most everyone.

In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk.

Explorer and inventor, soldier and poet, archaeologist and diplomat, Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was the most versatile and remarkable man of his age. But he was foremost an adventurer: “an adventurer in the intellectual and the spiritual as well as the physical world.” Byron Farwell brilliantly recreates the sheer excitement of Burton’s achievements and astonishing range of interests in this fascinating biography.

Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down with a stomach bug. What at first seemed like a case of food poisoning quickly turned critical, and by the time Tom had been transferred via emergency medevac to the world-class medical center at UC San Diego, where both he and Steffanie worked, blood work revealed why modern medicine was failing: Tom was fighting one of the most dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world.

On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe is a community where the principal residents are chimpanzees. Through Jane Goodall's eyes we watch young Figan's rise to power and old Mike's crushing defeat. We learn how one mother rears her children to succeed, and another dooms hers to failure. We witness horrifying murders, touching moments of affection, joyous births, and wrenching deaths. As Goodall compellingly tells the story of this intimately intertwined community, we are shown human emotions stripped to their essence. In the mirror of chimpanzee life, we see ourselves reflected.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types - extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving - has inspired television shows, Online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results - no less account for its success.

Nintendo has continually set the standard for video game innovation in America, starting in 1981 with a plucky hero who jumped over barrels to save a girl from an ape. The saga of Mario, the portly plumber who became the most successful franchise in the history of gaming, has plot twists worthy of a video game. Jeff Ryan shares the story of how this quintessentially Japanese company found success in the American market.

David L. Mearns has discovered some of the world's most fascinating and elusive shipwrecks. The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles his most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and mid-ocean stamina and courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind each of these oceanic tragedies. Combining the adventuring derring-do of Indiana Jones with the precision of a scientist, The Shipwreck Hunter opens an illuminating porthole into the shadowy depths of the ocean.

In the final decades of the 19th century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America's Gilded Age - Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse - battled as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires.

Rich Benoit went from buying a left-for-dead Tesla to becoming a successful YouTube entrepreneur and launching The Electrified Garage, the nation’s first successful EV-only business devoted to repairing Teslas and other electric vehicles. Today he is a strong advocate for right to repair and the world’s most popular DIY expert and car aficionado, and now he shares his story and expertise.