BeigeJournal

How Things Are Made: From Automobiles to Zippers, by Sharon Rose and Neil Schlager, 2003. Hardcover covered with denim with a pocket sewn on the front, complete with little notes about pocket construction printed around the pocket. Which is just adorable.

It brings to mind the classic The Way Things Work, though it differs in many ways. The focus is on fabrication rather than operation, but some entries contain more how it works than how it is made, for example, the seismometer entry. The entries are longer but many fewer in number than in The Way Things Work, and the diagrams, while useful, are not up to the same standard. The entries seemed to vary in quality, some, like the eyeglass and contact lens entries, seemed quite good, while others, such as the helicopter entry, seemed to try to take on more than can be handled in a few pages, with disappointing results.

There are touches of the style of industry promotional press releases, with the assurances that any waste materials are carefully disposed of, that highly trained engineers calculate everything carefully, that everything is assembled by highly skilled workers, and a bit of the gee-whiz isn’t this technology is making everyone’s life better tone. There are some of the all-too-common number problems. There are too-many-decimal-places metric conversions, like 32.79 yd (30m). Normally we see the opposite in American books: 30 yd (27.432m). There is at least one “mega” where there should be nothing at all. There is a “billion” where there ought to be a “million,” or else a “,” where there should be a “.” (and they do use the “.” as radix marker elsewhere, American style). Glaring as these are, this seems to be the normal level of error in book publishing. At least the authors avoided any mention of electric power consumption, or we’d be treated to the inevitable use of kilowatts, kilowatt-hours, megawatts, megawatts/day (a valid, if obscure, unit, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used correctly), kilowatt-hours/year, and every other variation on kilo/mega/giga and hours/days/years used as if interchangeable. Even in fairly technical books electric power units in particular are almost always garbled, often too badly to determine what was meant, if anything.

I’m not sure who the intended audience for the book is. The entries range from the surprisingly detailed to the breezily schematic, and the choices of topics themselves follow no obvious pattern, which makes it hard to categorize. Sometimes it seems like a children’s book (for older children), other times not. I’m not excited about it, but I’ve certainly read worse.