Inventors at Work: Interviews with 16 Notable American Inventors

Contents: * Foreword - James Burke * Introduction 1 - Paul MacCready - Gossamer Condor & Albatross - 1977 2 - Wilson Greatbatch - Implantable Pacemaker 3 - Maxime Faget - NASA - Mercury space capsule & Apollo 4 - Marvin Camras - Magnetic Recording - 1930s 5 - Bob Gundlach - Xerography (Xerox) 6 - Jerome Lemelson - Toys, Automated Manufacturing Systems 7 - Stanford Ovshinksy - Amorphous Materials for Integrated Circuits for Computers 8 - Mary Spaeth - Tunable Dye Laser - Hughes Aircraft Company & Laser Isotope Separation using Dye Lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab 9 - Jacob Rabinow - Mail Sorting Machines & Reading Machines for Banks 10 - Steve Wozniak - Apple Computers 11 - Raymond Kurzweil - Reading Machine for the Blind- Synthesizer Sounds 12 - Roman Szpur - Weapons Designer - First Non-Lens Focusing System for Lasers 13 - Marcian E. 'Ted' Hoff - First Microprocessor for Intel (4004) 14 - Gordon Gould - Laser - 1957 15 - Harold Rosen - First Geo-Synchronous Satellite, Syncom II - instantaneous worldwide communications 16 - Nat Wyeth - Plastic Soda Pop Bottle - Du Pont Coporation

Even though this book is approaching 18 years old, it still reads like it was written yesterday. Which is not suprising considering the creative/inventive/innovative personality has been with us as long as we've been human. Brown is a skilled interviewer in that he asks the right questions that allow us to inhabit the thoughts of some of the most intriguing people of our time. What makes this book worthwhile for those who are interested in innovation is that Brown asks questions that get the subjects to talk about the process of invention, not just the inventions themselves. Even though the characters are diverse, the way they describe the process is remarkably similar. What is most gratifying is that the inventors freely talk about the often mundane obstacles that get in their way and the very practical approaches they have to take to overcome them. If innovation is going to be the savior of the US economic engine, then it is important to understand how, to quote John Lienhard, inventive minds work. This book provides a solid foundation for how the work of invention is done.