A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Recommended by Bill Gates and Nick Szabo
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See customer reviews on Amazon →Recommended by 4 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, Technology, and Science.
Hardly a week passes without some highprofile court case that features intellectual property at its center. But how did the belief that one could own an idea come about And how did that belief change the way humankind lives and works William Rosen, author of Justinian's Flea, seeks to answer these questions and more with The Most Powerful Idea i...
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Why recommended
Recommended by 4 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, Technology, and Science.
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Bill Gates
Co-founder of Microsoft; co-chair of the Gates Foundation
“An entertaining narrative weaving together the clever characters, incremental innovations and historical context behind the steam engines that gave birth to our modern world.”
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Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.
