About book The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made The Carburetor Possible - And Other Journeys Through Knowledge (1997)
This book employs a very neat mechanism to demonstrate a host of connections between people, inventions, and events across the world and through history. Burke’s basic premise is that history is non-linear, with closer resemblance to a spider web. So every chapter is chock full of names and terms with superscripts and “gates” in the adjacent margins. A gate indexes you to another place in the book where that subject appears. The result is a non-fiction “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.” Depending how much the reader skips around, there are many ways to read this book besides cover-to-cover. I developed my own method to ensure that I made full use of the gates yet read the entire text. Marking the book up with a pencil was mandatory to avoid “Wait, did I already read this?” moments. Taking lots of gates keeps the reader engaged and actively involved with absorbing the material. That said, a feeling of chaos and disorganization is hard to shake. But you actually encounter that even by reading straight through. For example, two paragraphs on Mr. A, who developed C, and he was buddies with Mr. B, the founder of D, and after a paragraph on the history of D we’re onto Miss E who occasionally washed the socks of Mr. B, etc. Everything is a series of snippets and it’s challenging to envision the larger context, which personally makes it more difficult to retain the wealth of information in this book. Additionally, the underlying claim that thing C is surprisingly related to thing Z because of all these intermediate steps is a bit ridiculous. To suggest causation, even indirect causation, is misguided. Miss E probably would have invented the F-matic regardless of Mr. A. But it provides an excellent reminder that genius and innovation do not occur in isolation- we’re all standing on shoulders and looking back to advance forward. It is a fun, dizzying and ricocheting ride through history.
This book is by the same man who was host of the PBS series Connections a number of years ago, and the format of the book is very similar to the TV show. It deals with how various incidents in the history of the world led to other developments which, in turn, led to other developments etc. etc. Mostly it's science, technology, inventions (even small improvements) etc. But the links also include cultural trends, language, fairy tales, sugar, potatoes, the tea ceremony, etc. Serves to illustrate the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, even though that wasn't his purpose.An interesting thing about this book - there are notes all through showing where something mentioned in one place in the story is also referred to in another place or places in one of the other stories. If this were an e-book they would probably be internal links to other parts of the book (I think this was written shortly before the development of e-readers, or at least before they became common). I wonder if this book contributed to the development of internal links and e-readers?
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I have loved James Burke's method of teaching history ever since I saw my first episode of Connections on PBS all those years ago. I had a chance to hear this brilliant man speak in person at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall in Portland, OR. He is no less amazing in person as he is on his well thought out television program.This book is a wonderful collection of more of those interesting historical connections, told by a man who understands dry humor. This is another in a series of books written in this fashion, such as Circles, and The Knowledge Web. James Burke takes the reader on a fascinating journey to show how everyday modern inventions came to being through a series of seemingly random historical events. I wish I had had a teacher like James Burke when I was in school. History teachers take note: This is how you teach history and make it interesting for everyone!
—Matthew
