Paths of Fire: The Gun and the World It Made

by Andrew Nahum

Type “Mikhail Kalashnikov” into Google and the biography of the inventor will come back to you almost at the speed of light. Squeeze the trigger of a Kalashnikov and a bullet is kicked up the barrel by an archaic chemical explosion that would have been quite familiar to Oliver Cromwell or General Custer. The gun—antique, yet contemporary—still dominates the world. Geopolitical events and even consumer culture have been molded by the often-unseen research that firearms evoked. The new science of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton owed much to the Renaissance study of ballistics. But research into making guns and aiming them also brought on the more recent invention of mass production and kickstarted the contemporary field of artificial intelligence. This book follows the history of the gun and its often-unsuspected wider linkages, looking from the first cannons to modern gunnery, and to the yet-to-be-realized electrical futures of rays and beams.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published July 2, 2021

About the author

Andrew Nahum is Principal Curator of Technology and Engineering at the Science Museum, London. He recently led the curatorial team which created the acclaimed special exhibition Inside the Spitfire, and previously directed the creation of the major new synoptic gallery at the Museum on the history of technology and science entitled Making the Modern World.

He has written extensively on the history of technology, aviation and transport for both scholarly and popular journals. His books include a study of Alec Issigonis the designer of the Mini and the Morris Minor cars in Issigonis and the Mini and Frank Whittle in Frank Whittle: Invention of the Jet and he is currently completing a technological and economic study of the British aircraft industry in the years following the Second World War.

Reviews

[Jerry Wall · Rating 4 out of 5]

New consideration of what guns with powder propelling shot to protect us from our enemies.
China first with gunpowder and other, more western powers, developing a bullet to hurt or kill
an enemy. then on through rifles to automated or repeating rifles to gatling guns, etc.
All as impetus for assembly lines, mass production and streamline and improving other instrumentalities of life.

All growing form defense perceived needs to keep an enemy from bothering us.