How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

Your time machine broke down, and you're stuck in the past. This amusing guide will help you pass the hours reading about things you can "invent" (and take credit for), but it does not provide enough detailed information to come up with any but the simplest contraptions. (That would in reality take many volumes of encyclopedic length.) I can recommend this book, as long as you don't expect it to really help you (re)build civilization.

I bought this as a gift for my boyfriend. He really enjoyed it and even loaned it to family members. Very well written, and a conversation starter!

Not life-changing literature, but a light, entertaining, and well-sourced history of technology.Reminiscent of Carl Sagan or Bill Bryson, but for people who don’t want to work too hard.

How to Invent Everything is a fun book with a unique premise -- you’re a time traveler who’s somehow gotten stranded in the past, and you’re unable to fix your (rented) time machine on your own...so you check out the manual from the time travel company (aka this book).Only it isn’t really a manual for the machine. Instead, since fixing the machine is so complicated, they’ve provided you with a manual for how to make past!Earth more like an Earth you’d want to live on, including instructions for how to do things like inventing standardized measurements, figuring out which animals will help you most, and building machines to do all sorts of things for you.It’s a fun book with all sorts of stuff I didn’t know, and I do think it’s useful for a general overview of human technology/civilization.But.There’s two major problems.First, the instructions aren’t always clear. If I really wanted to learn how to program a computer, for instance, this isn’t the book I’d go to. Even something simpler, like building a kiln or a mill. The basics are there, but not enough.On a similar note, the book tells you where and when you’d find certain plants/animals, but it doesn’t include enough to identify them. Even a simple description would been helpful; a picture would have been better.Generally, the book needed a LOT more images. I get that ebooks do have file transfer fees, but still. This needed to be an image-heavy book, and it wasn’t nearly image-heavy enough.Second, the premise gets a little...Tired.I get what the author was going for, but in some ways it would’ve been better if he hadn’t hammered it in so much.I did mostly enjoy the book, and it does have some useful information.But the problems were big enough to knock it down a star.

This book is entertaining and informative, but the title is overblown. And the conceit that the book is intended to help time travelers stranded in the past recreate the comforts of modern civilization quickly enough to be realized in their lifetime wears a little thin at times. If it was really going to serve that purpose, the book is rather lacking in prosaic, but essential details, such as "how am I going to kill some animals to eat while I am ramping up agriculture?"In fact, North never mentions weapons at all, except to say that, "While this text does not include explicit instructions for weaponry, we're certain that, should the need arise, you can probably adapt several of the technologies included here to that purpose." (He doesn't even include the formula for gunpowder in the appendix, "Useful Chemicals, How to Make Them, and How They Can Definitely Kill You"! It's useful to have an explosive at hand, even if you never use it in a projectile weapons.) Given that fact that, in most eras of the past, you would probably need weapons right away, for hunting and defense, this would be small comfort for the stranded time traveler. North's style of humor also wore a little thin for me after a while.Having said all that, the book is fun and informative. I am glad I read it and I did learn something.I would also like to comment on the reviews complaining about the Kindle edition of this book being impossible to view the numerous diagrams. This may well, be true, if you are reading it on a Kindle; but I had no trouble viewing them in the Kindle app on my iPad. While I think Amazon does deserve criticism for not making the ebook usable on their flagship ereader, I don't think it's fair to penalize the author by giving this book low star ratings for something he has no control over.

Excelente si te gusta aprender datos curiosos o tienes inquietud sobre el origen de las cosas que disfrutamos día a día.El libro abarca diversos temas, tales como: Agricultura, domesticación de animales, herbolaria básica, alimentación, minería, entre muchas otras.La redacción es muy entretenida, mi única observación es que sería de mayor utilidad si tuviera algunas ilustraciones más o instrucciones más detalladas en algunas cosas

Llegó muy bien el libro! Perfectas condiciones

It's catchy, fun to read, and really interesting. But seriously : it's printed way too small. I've never seen something so tiny. It's barely readable. I wish it was printed bigger on more pages.

A great book that gives an overview of how different technologies work and which prerequisites you need to invent them all over, written in a really fun and entertaining way.Sadly, in my edition of the book pages 135 - 166 (chapters 10.2.4 - 10.4.2) were missing, while pp. 167-198 where double.

Lo único que no me gusta es que el tamaño de la letra que es más pequeño del habitual - hey nadie dijo que concentrar todos los conocimientos hasta nuestros días de invenciones y procesos industriales fueran a caber fácilmente en un solo libro.... -