Title: Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way)

Author: Roma Agrawal

Completed: Jan 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: I was very excited to read this book, hoping it could tell a story of human history and invention by focusing on a handful of inventions/discoveries. I was a bit disappointed. The discussion of science and engineering concepts seemed aimed at an upper elementary or middle school level. From memory, the author went much deeper into these concepts in the interview I heard. It’s not a bad book, just not what I was looking for. If you’re just starting to learn about engineering (and really like “dad joke” level puns), this book could be for you. Otherwise, there are better options available.

Highlights:

• It’s difficult to imagine now, but nails were so valued in this pre-industrial era, where materials and skilled workers weren’t readily available, that the British banned their export to their colonies, including North America, where timber housing was the norm. As a result, nails became so precious there that some people even set fire to their homes when moving in order to retrieve the nails from the ashes. In 1619, a law was passed in the state of Virginia to discourage this practice
• it was decided to verify whether flush riveting genuinely made a difference to the Spitfire’s speed. The methods they employed to test this were unusual. Engineers glued a split pea to the head of every flush rivet on the plane (making it look, according to one source, like it had a ‘chickenpox infection’), then flew it and noted the speed. More test flights followed, in which the split peas were removed in stages and the results noted. This ultimately vindicated Mitchell’s choice of flat heads: data showed that domed rivets would reduce the top speed of the fighter plane by up to 35km per hour.
• we were making jewellery, wine, boats, and musical instruments (which are all pretty impressive feats of engineering) long before we thought up the wheel.
• The problem lay in plotting the Earth’s longitudes, a vital means of orientation when approaching land. (Polynesian navigators had been calculating longitude for years through natural observation and knew their patch of ocean well, but these techniques weren’t used in the West.)
• designing EMUs for the Apollo Lunar mission – but they had other problems. The suits being designed at the time were stiff and bulky, and severely restricted the astronauts’ movements. In 1967, the industrial division of Playtex – a company that specialised in making girdles and bras – used their experience to create a spacesuit made almost entirely from fabric. They put one of their employees in their prototype and then filmed him running and kicking and throwing a football in the field of a local high school. They won the contract, giving their bra-sewing seamstresses a new project to work on.
• Engineering tells an intrinsically human story.
• we only ‘own’ an object for a small proportion of its life, and that having a deeper understanding of design will reveal the massive repercussions, the long chain of events that affect our planet every time we produce or consume something,