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John Henry

Francis Bacon - a leading figure in the history of science - never made a major discovery, provided a lasting explanation of any physical phenomena or revealed any hidden laws of nature. How then can he rank as he does alongside Newton? Bacon was the first major thinker to describe how science should be done, and to explain why. Scientific knowledge should not be gathered for its own sake but for practical benefit to mankind. And Bacon promoted experimentation, coming to outline and define the rigorous procedures of the 'scientific method' that today from the very bedrock of modern scientific progress. John Henry gives a dramatic account of the background to Bacon's innovations and the sometimes unconventional sources for his ideas. Why was he was so concerned to revolutionize the attitude to scientific knowledge - and why do his ideas for reform still resonate today?

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Knowledge is Power (Icon Science): How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Helped Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science

Andrew Nahum

The story of the jet engine has everything: genius, tragedy, heroism, a world war, the individual vs. the state, and an idea that would change the world.
Frank Whittle always maintained that he was held back by a lack of government support. At the very moment in 1943 when his invention was unveiled to the world, his company, Power Jets, was forcibly nationalised.
Yet Whittle's brilliance, charm and charisma helped him recruit major support from the British government and the RAF, who gave him the green light to build a jet engine at a time when to do so made little sense. Here is a story of what pushing technology to its limits can achieve - and the effect that such achievement can have on those involved.

Frank Whittle (Icon Science): The Invention of the Jet

Jon Agar

The history of the computer is entwined with that of the modern world and most famously with the life of one man, Alan Turing. How did this device, which first appeared a mere 50 years ago, come to structure and dominate our lives so totally? An enlightening mini-biography of a brilliant but troubled man.

Turing and the Universal Machine (Icon Science): The Making of the Modern Computer

Iwan Rhys Morus

The only scientist to ever appear on the British twenty pound note, Michael Faraday is one of the most recognisable names in the history of science.
Faraday's forte was electricity, a revolutionary force in nineteenth-century society. The electric telegraph had made mass-communication possible and inventors looked forward to the day when electricity would control all aspects of life. By the end of the century, this dream was well on its way to being realised. But what was Faraday's role in all this? How did his science come to have such an impact on the lives of the Victorians (and ultimately on us)?
Iwan Morus tells the story of Faraday's upbringing in London and his apprenticeship at the Royal Institution under the supervision of the flamboyant chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, all set against the backdrop of a vibrant scientific culture and an empire near the peak of its power.

Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Icon Science)

Patricia Fara

When the imperial explorer James Cook returned from his first voyage to Australia, scandal writers mercilessly satirised the amorous exploits of his botanist Joseph Banks, whose trousers were reportedly stolen while he was inside the tent of Queen Oberea of Tahiti. Was the pursuit of scientific truth really what drove Enlightenment science?
In Sweden and Britain, both imperial powers, Banks and Carl Linneaus ruled over their own small scientific empires, promoting botanical exploration to justify the exploitation of territories, peoples and natural resources. Regarding native peoples with disdain, these two scientific emperors portrayed the Arctic North and the Pacific Ocean as uncorrupted Edens, free from the shackles of Western sexual mores.
In this 'absorbing' (Observer) book, Patricia Fara reveals the existence, barely concealed under Banks' and Linnaeus' camouflage of noble Enlightenment, of the altogether more seedy drives to conquer, subdue and deflower in the name of the British Imperial state.

Sex, Botany and Empire (Icon Science): The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks

Electricity was the scientific fashion of the Enlightenment, 'an Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men'. Lecturers attracted huge audiences to marvel at sparkling fountains, flaming drinks, pirouetting dancers and electrified boys. Enlightenment optimists predicted that this new-found power of nature would cure illnesses, improve crop production, even bring the dead back to life. 

Benjamin Franklin, better known as one of America's founding fathers, played a key role in developing the new instruments and theories of electricity during the eighteenth century. Celebrated for drawing lightning down from the sky with a kite, Franklin was an Enlightenment expert on electricity, developing one of the most successful explanations of this mysterious phenomenon.

But Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor of Clare College Cambridge, reveals how the study of electricity became intertwined with Enlightenment politics. By demonstrating their control of the natural world, Enlightenment philosophers hoped to gain authority over society. And their stunning electrical performances provided dramatic evidence of their special powers.

An Entertainment for Angels (Icon Science): Electricity in the Enlightenment

Piers Bizony

Riddled with jealousy, rivalry, missed opportunities and moments of genius, the history of the atom's discovery is as bizarre, as capricious, and as weird as the atom itself. 

John Dalton gave us the first picture of the atom in the early 1800s. Almost 100 years later the young misfit New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, showed the atom consisted mostly of space, and in doing so overturned centuries of classical science. It was a brilliant Dane, Neils Bohr, who made the next great leap - into the incredible world of quantum theory. Yet, he and a handful of other revolutionary young scientists weren't prepared for the shocks Nature had up her sleeve. 

This 'insightful, compelling' book (New Scientist) reveals the mind-bending discoveries that were destined to upset everything we thought we knew about reality and unleash a dangerous new force upon the world. Even today, as we peer deeper and deeper into the atom, it throws back as many questions at us as answers.

Atom (Icon Science)

Ehsan Masood

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.

From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston, 

Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.

Science and Islam (Icon Science): A History

Brian Switek

Darwin's theory of evolution was for more than a century dogged by a major problem: the evidence proving the connections between the main groups of organisms was nowhere to be found.

By the 1970s this absence of 'transitional fossils' was hotly debated; some palaeontologists wondered if these 'missing links' had been so quick that no trace of them was left. However, during the past three decades fossils of walking whales from Pakistan, feathered dinosaurs from China, fish with feet from the Arctic Circle, ape-like humans from Africa, and many more bizarre creatures that fill in crucial gaps in our understanding of evolution have all been unearthed.

The first account of the hunt for evolution's 'missing links', Written in Stone shows how these discoveries have revolutionised palaeontology, and explores what its findings might mean for our place on earth.

Written in Stone (Icon Science)

Andrew Gregory

Medicine, anatomy, astronomy, mathematics and cosmology, science began with the Greeks, and Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates were amongst its stars. That man ever managed to develop a 'scientific' attitude to the natural world at all is one of the true wonders of human thought.
Eureka! shows how, free from intellectual and religious dogma, these early thinkers rejected myths and capricious gods and, in distinguishing between the natural and supernatural, effectively discovered nature.

Andrew Gregory, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, unravels the genesis of science in this fascinating exploration of the origins of Western civilisation, and our desire for a rational, legitimating system of the world.