Name: How to Invent Everything
ISBN: 9780735220157

Ryan North

How to Invent Everything

***One of BBC Focus magazine's top books of 2018*** Get ready to make history better... on the second try. Imagine you are stranded in the past (your time machine has broken) and the only way home is to rebuild civilization yourself. But you need to do it better and faster this time round. In this one amazing book, you will learn How to Invent Everything. Ryan North -- bestselling author, programmer and comic book legend -- provides all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, philosophy, facts and figures required for this challenge. Thanks to his detailed blueprint, humanity will mature quickly and efficiently – instead of spending 200,000 years stumbling around in the dark without language, not realising that tying a rock to a string would mean we could navigate the entire world. Or thinking disease was caused by weird smells. Fascinating and hilarious, How To Invent Everything is an epic, deeply researched history of the key technologies that made each stage of human history possible (from writing and farming to buttons and birth control) – and it's as entertaining as a great time-travel novel. So if you’ve ever secretly wondered if you could do history better yourself, now is your chance to find out how.

Rebuild All of Civilization (with 96% fewer catastrophes this time)

Patrick Book

Creating society from scratch never seemed so possible!

An NPR Best Book of 2018 "How to Invent Everything is such a cool book. It's essential reading for anyone who needs to duplicate an industrial civilization quickly." --Randall Munroe, xkcd creator and New York Times-bestselling author of What If? The only book you need if you're going back in time What would you do if a time machine hurled you thousands of years into the past. . . and then broke? How would you survive? Could you improve on humanity's original timeline? And how hard would it be to domesticate a giant wombat? With this book as your guide, you'll survive--and thrive--in any period in Earth's history. Bestselling author and time-travel enthusiast Ryan North shows you how to invent all the modern conveniences we take for granted--from first principles. This illustrated manual contains all the science, engineering, art, philosophy, facts, and figures required for even the most clueless time traveler to build a civilization from the ground up. Deeply researched, irreverent, and significantly more fun than being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, How to Invent Everything will make you smarter, more competent, and completely prepared to become the most important and influential person ever. You're about to make history. . . better.

A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

Ben Burns

I always wanted to write this book: a guide to how you could recreate the inventions and progress of society if you had to do it all yourself. But I wouldn't have had the stamina to research it all - and I wouldn't have thought of such an ingenious premise, namely that this is a manual written for when your time machine breaks down and you're stranded in the past. And of course, Ryan North being who he is, he milks this premise for an incredibly high average of about 1 actual out-loud-laugh per page.

Read this book to learn things like how to create language, numbers, and logic; how to farm, breed livestock, and treat illnesses; how to tell what past time period you're stranded in based on what kind of dinosaurs, people, or constellations are around; how to develop increasingly interesting technologies like charcoal, kilns, waterwheels, glass, bikes, engines, and airplanes, all literally from scratch; and how to appreciate how embarrassing it is that it took humanity 200,000 years after we showed up - and 12,000 years after we invented farming - to come up with any of this stuff. 

I now know way more about everything than I did before, and I had a great time learning it. Plus, if some sort of apocalypse or time travel mishap ever puts me in a situation where I have to rebuild civilization and its knowledge from scratch, I'll be in a much better spot.

Rose Stanley

This is just a delight to read - North gives us a history lesson and a science lesson all in one and he makes it fun...his geeky joy over learning new things is infectious. 

I'm still not sure I am quite up to inventing EVERYTHING (computers especially) but I now have even more respect for the people who did manage to invent things (apart from the people who decided not to tell people about their idea, hid it for way longer than necessary because they wanted to make allllll the money off it or sued the ass off anyone else who tried to use any variation on it YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE). 

Read this if you want to learn more about people, processes, or both.

Jeremy Cote

I found the book to be quite enjoyable. It was a fun read, full of interesting facts and a lot of wit. Of course, this isn’t a book that will change your life, but it did give me more appreciation for things in our world we take for granted. The writing itself is great, and the small chapters make it easy to dive in.

Jack Baty

I've never had this much fun learning how to do things like domesticate animals and make penicillin.

Jasper 

Pierre

Sara Piteira 

Damiano Plebani

Anna Pinto

Cameron Price-Austin

Sylvain Lafitte

'How to Invent Everythingis such a cool book' -- Randall Munroe Get ready to make history better... on the second try. Imagine you are stranded in the past (your time machine has broken) and the only way home is to rebuild civilization yourself. But you need to do it better and faster this time round. In this one amazing book, you will learn How to Invent Everything. Ryan North -- bestselling author, programmer and comic book legend -- provides all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, philosophy, facts and figures required for this challenge. Thanks to his detailed blueprint, humanity will mature quickly and efficiently - instead of spending 200,000 years stumbling around in the dark without language, not realising that tying a rock to a string would mean we could navigate the entire world. Or thinking disease was caused by weird smells. Fascinating and hilarious, How To Invent Everythingis an epic, deeply researched history of the key technologies that made each stage of human history possible (from writing and farming to buttons and birth control) - and it's as entertaining as a great time-travel novel. So if you've ever secretly wondered if you could do history better yourself, now is your chance to find out how.