Compelling narratives of five great technological revolutions—steam, electricity, computing, the internet, and artificial intelligence.

This book traces how transformative technologies emerge, spread, and reorganize society. It draws together technical histories, biographies, and contemporary accounts to follow how successive general-purpose technologies move from limited experiments to world-shaping infrastructure. Technical ideas are explained clearly and without jargon.

The story unfolds through vivid narrative vignettes from the lives of inventors, engineers, and financiers—including James Watt, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, Gordon Moore, Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen, Frank Rosenblatt, Yann LeCun and many more.

By placing these revolutions side by side, the book compresses decades of specialized history into a single comparative arc, revealing recurring patterns such as Innovator's Dilemma, network effects, speculative manias, and infrastructure overbuilds.

The book is published anonymously due to employer policy.

It's been shared largely by word of mouth, rather than through traditional marketing. If you end up reading it and have thoughts you'd like to share, please leave a review on Amazon to help future readers decide whether it's for them.

You can reach the author directly by emailing author [at] fromsteamtosilicon [dot] com.