Two excellent new books on the history of technology

1. David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity.  The typewriter and the bicycle revolutionized India early in the twentieth century

2. Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America.  Two of the takeaways from this book are a) the United States had a more statist approach to electricity infrastructure than did most of Europe, and to its advantage, and b) we didn’t let lots of people accidentally being electrocuted stop progress, again probably to our advantage.