James Gleick

From the New York Times bestselling author, a thrilling history of the telephone and how we fell in and out of love with a technology that changed not just the world, but changed us.'Charts our distance-compressing, time-shifting telephonic adventure with exceptional brio and subtlety' – Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth ExtinctionOne hundred and fifty years ago the telephone burst onto the world stage like magic, a supernatural instrument bringing voices from afar. Its invention has been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision, but was in fact a contest replete with bribery, fraud and speculation, and no one, not even its inventors, realised what it was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.Instantly, the ability to speak across vast distances began to transform every part of life: from business organization to military tactics, from news gathering to sex work. Along the way, the telephone changed human nature. As it settled into the background – in offices and on streets, on bedside tables and kitchen walls – people forgot how they ever lived without it.In The Telephone, bestselling author James Gleick reveals the continuous revolution sparked by its invention and the corrupt scheming and ruthless tactics of those who sought to make money from it, tracking the rise of the largest monopoly in history.As dial telephones, landlines, telephone books and telephone booths vanish into the past, he shows how this commonplace object irreversibly changed not only the world but who we are as human beings.'Gleick does what only the best science writers can do: take a subject of which most of us are only peripherally aware and put it at the center of the universe' – Time

From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, a mind-bending exploration of time travel. Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilisations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture - from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. He explores the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilisations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture - from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. He explores the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

James Gleick, the author of the bestsellers Chaos and Genius, brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality--the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code. In The Information James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the 'bit', it is a fascinating account of the modern age's defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives.