Beginning in a Boston soap-and-candle shop where Benjamin Franklin was born, this volume of the Chronicles of America follows the mechanical genius of a young nation: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, the first steamboats, New England’s spindles and looms, the reaper, the telegraph, vulcanized rubber, the machine shop, electricity and, at last, the conquest of the air.
A brisk, readable history of how tinkerers and inventors reshaped American life in little more than two centuries. Download the free EPUB.