Circuits from silk? Today's technophiles probably have no idea how much today's computer technology owes to the invention of one ingenuous textile manufacturer in nineteenth-century France. Here, master storyteller James Essinger shows through a series of remarkable and meticulously researched historical connections how the Jacquard loom kick-started a process of scientific evolution which would lead directly to the development of the modern computer.
Jacquard's 1804 invention, a loom which used punch cards with stored instructions for weaving different patterns and designs, enabled the...

Ada's Algorithm tells the story of Ada Lovelace's turbulent life, and tells through the story of her life how she could have started the digital revolution two centuries ago but was thwarted by the then prevalent disregard for the intelligence of women.

Thalidomide: patented in Germany as a non-toxic cure-all for sleeplessness and morning sickness; a wonder drug with no side effects. The devastation this drug caused is boundless, the unborn victims of its neurotoxins left with deformities and without limbs, sometimes never to be born at all. In the UK, it took hundreds of foetal deaths and abnormalities to lead to the drug's withdrawal, but in the US one woman stood in the way of Big Phrama and prevented catastrophe. bn Here James Essinger and Sandra Koutzenko explore the devastating world history of thalidomide, its development,...

`Writing Fiction is a little pot of gold... Screenplay by Syd Field for film, Writing Fiction by James Essinger for fiction. It's that simple.' William Osborne, novelist and screenwriter Writing Fiction - a user-friendly guide is a must-read if you want to write stories to a professional standard. It draws on the author's more than thirty years of experience as a professional writer, and on the work and ideas of writers including: * Anthony Burgess * Joseph Conrad * George Eliot * Ken Follett * Frederick Forsyth * Dan Harmon * Ernest Hemingway * David Lodge * Norman Mailer ...