Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age - Tapa dura

[An] unusual and compelling study.

Because electrons are mostly invisible, our visualizations of them tell us more about our dreams than about electrons. This cool and unusual book gathers our earliest collective dreams about circuits and electronics and makes them visible. It got me thinking about our assumptions for tomorrow. I love it when a book like this makes me see the world differently.--Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants

Fascinating.... [A] fantastically geeky visual tour of tech industry history as seen through the lens of the commercial art that helped popularize it.--Meg Miller

Attentive readers of Prelinger's lively chronology will come away with an appreciation of how the visual representations of technology are integral to our understanding of it.--Chris Rasmussen

Unusual and insightful.... Filled with retro tech-industry ads, magazine covers and other commercial artworks, this erudite book takes readers on a cultural history tour that sharply reveals 'art's ability to touch the intangible and render it visible.'--John Wilwol

An essential and eye-popping visual history of electronics, a glimpse of the electronic infrastructure captured in the brief moment before it miniaturized down to a scale too small for the eye to see, disappearing from our ordinary view forever, even as it burrowed into our buildings, streets, vehicles and even our bodies.--Cory Doctorow coeditor of Boing Boing and author of In Real Life and Information Doesn't Want to Be Free

A highly original cultural history of 20th-century technology examined through the lens of commercial art.... Sophisticated in its grasp of science and technological history but also accessible to general readers.

In the early twentieth century, engineers learned to control the flow of electrons. Yet this epoch-making achievement the underpinning of all electronics technologies to come was not visible to the naked eye. Inside the Machine explores how a generation of commercial and fine artists conveyed this strange new world to the public. Together with engineers, they would transform the human sense of scale and possibility. Cultural historian Megan Prelinger offers a visual tour of this dynamic era, which saw advances and practical revolutions in automation, bionics, computer language, and even cybernetics. Along the way, she reveals the origins of everything from vacuum tubes and integrated circuits to motherboards and rocket ships. With more than 150 illustrations from commercial artwork of the day, Inside the Machine celebrates the collaboration among the makers, crafters, testers, and researchers of the twentieth century and the artists who lent images and understanding to the technologies of tomorrow."