Description: Electronics relates the fascinating stories of how scientists and engineers created and commercialized such devices as the transistor, the Magnetron tube used to power microwave ovens, the CRT (cathode ray tube), the laser, the first integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and memory chips.
Brief description: David L. Morton Jr. is a historian of technology with expertise in the history of sound recording, electronics, and electric power. He is the former research historian for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Review Quotes: This book will be very useful if you are involved in delivering courses, such as general studies, which attempt to make connections between science and society. If you ignore the plethora of names and acronyms, this book is a sobering account of the economics of the past development of the semiconductor devices which give us so much ease and delight today . . . Put this book in your school library. Read it if you teach, or aspire to teach, electronics or physics. It will give you a fresh perspective on how silk purses (such as iPods) can indeed be made from sows' ears (such as ICBM guidance systems).
--School Science Review