Standing at 1900 and looking back, patent examiner Edward W. Byrn drew up the century’s astonishing account: The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century marches through steam, telegraph, photography, rubber, steel, sewing machines, telephones and phonographs — the whole transformation of daily life by patentable ingenuity.
His famous opening image — the century as an unexampled leap — still sets the tone for how we tell technology’s story. Download the free EPUB for the nineteenth century’s own victory lap.