11 Best Inventions Books
Inventions is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top Inventions audiobooks everyone must read.
See the top 11 Inventions audiobooks below.
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Nano
- By: Jess Wade
- Narrator: Imogen Wilde
- Length: 14 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: October 26, 2021
- Language: English
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4.35(169 ratings)
4.35(169 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.009.99 USDAn acclaimed physicist introduces young audiences to the tiny building blocks that make up the world around us. Elegant and friendly, his explanations of atoms, the elements, and other essential science concepts reveal how very (very) smallAn acclaimed physicist introduces young audiences to the tiny building blocks that make up the world around us. Elegant and friendly, his explanations of atoms, the elements, and other essential science concepts reveal how very (very) small materials are manipulated to create self-washing windows, stronger and lighter airplanes, and other wonders of nanotechnology. This tribute to the tiny will inspire curious minds of every stripe.
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How Innovation Works
- By: Matt Ridley
- Narrator: Matt Ridley
- Length: 12 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: May 19, 2020
- Language: English
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4.13(1611 ratings)
4.13(1611 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.006.99 USDBuilding on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject. Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience bothBuilding on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject.
Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.
Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, not a matter of lonely genius. It is gradual, serendipitous, recombinant, inexorable, contagious, experimental and unpredictable. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.
Ridley derives these and other lessons, not with abstract argument, but from telling the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or in some cases failed. He goes back millions of years and leaps forward into the near future. Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertiliser, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, faddish diets, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright and even–a biological innovation–life itself.
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Temple Grandin
- By: Sy Montgomery
- Narrator: Meredith Mitchell
- Length: 2 hours 48 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2012
- Language: English
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4.05(3245 ratings)
4.05(3245 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0014.95 USDWhen Temple Grandin was born, her parents knew that she was different. It wasn’t until years later that she was diagnosed with autism, a brain disorder that makes communication difficult. Today, Dr. Temple Grandin is a brilliant scientist andWhen Temple Grandin was born, her parents knew that she was different. It wasn’t until years later that she was diagnosed with autism, a brain disorder that makes communication difficult. Today, Dr. Temple Grandin is a brilliant scientist and professor of animal science at Colorado State University. Her world-changing career has revolutionized the livestock industry–each year, half the cattle in the United States are handled in cruelty-free facilities she has designed. She is also a passionate advocate for autism, using her experience to prove that people with this disorder can have “normal” lives.
To achieve this unprecedented success, Temple used a unique ability: she thinks visually, the same way animals do. Because she thinks in pictures, she can see the world as a cow or a dog or a pig might see it. And so she knows that animals raised for food deserve good lives and should be treated with respect. Now she gives them their voices.
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Google It
- By: Anna Crowley Redding
- Narrator: Lauren Ezzo
- Length: 4 hours 18 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.03(394 ratings)
4.03(394 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0014.95 USDFrenemies + Homework + Legos = Google? From a college project made out of knock-off legos, Google became one of the most influential companies in the world. Award-winning investigative reporter Anna Crowley Redding shares the true story of Google,Frenemies + Homework + Legos = Google? From a college project made out of knock-off legos, Google became one of the most influential companies in the world. Award-winning investigative reporter Anna Crowley Redding shares the true story of Google, its history, innovations, and where it will take us next is this compelling nonfiction account.
Think. Invent. Organize. Share. Don’t be evil. And change the world.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started out as two Stanford college students with a wild idea: They were going to organize the world’s information. From that one deceptively simple goal, they created one of the most influential and innovative companies in the world. The word “google” has even entered our vocabulary as a verb. Now, find out the true history of Google–from its humble beginnings as a thesis project made out of “borrowed” hardware and discount toys through its revolution of the world’s relationship with technology to a brief glimpse of where they might take us next.
Award-winning investigative reporter Anna Crowley Redding shares an inspiring story of innovation, personal and intellectual bravery, and of shooting for the moon to change the world.
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Isaac the Alchemist
- By: Mary Losure
- Narrator: Steven Crossley
- Length: 2 hours 36 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: February 14, 2017
- Language: English
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3.98(379 ratings)
3.98(379 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.009.99 USDBefore Isaac Newton became the father of physics, an accomplished mathematician, or a leader of the scientific revolution, he was a boy living in an apothecary’s house, observing and experimenting, recording his observations of the world in aBefore Isaac Newton became the father of physics, an accomplished mathematician, or a leader of the scientific revolution, he was a boy living in an apothecary’s house, observing and experimenting, recording his observations of the world in a tiny notebook. As a young genius living in a time before science as we know it existed, Isaac studied the few books he could get his hands on, built handmade machines, and experimented with alchemy, a process of chemical reactions that seemed (at the time) to be magical. Mary Losure’s riveting narrative nonfiction account of Isaac’s early life traces his development as a thinker from his childhood, in friendly prose that will capture the attention of today’s budding scientists-as if by magic.
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Quirky
- By: Melissa A Schilling
- Narrator: Erin Bennett
- Length: 10 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: February 13, 2018
- Language: English
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3.85(438 ratings)
3.85(438 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.98 USDThe science behind the traits and quirks that drive creative geniuses to make spectacular breakthroughs What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world — those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another?The science behind the traits and quirks that drive creative geniuses to make spectacular breakthroughs
What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world — those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us?
Melissa Schilling, one of the world’s leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people — Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs — to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again. While all innovators possess incredible intellect, intellect alone, she shows, does not create a breakthrough innovator. It was their personal, social, and emotional quirkiness that enabled true genius to break through–not just once but again and again.
Nearly all of the innovators, for example, exhibited high levels of social detachment that enabled them to break with norms, an almost maniacal faith in their ability to overcome obstacles, and a passionate idealism that pushed them to work with intensity even in the face of criticism or failure. While these individual traits would be unlikely to work in isolation — being unconventional without having high levels of confidence, effort, and goal directedness might, for example, result in rebellious behavior that does not lead to meaningful outcomes — together they can fuel both the ability and drive to pursue what others deem impossible.
Schilling shares the science behind the convergence of traits that increases the likelihood of success. And, as Schilling also reveals, there is much to learn about nurturing breakthrough innovation in our own lives — in, for example, the way we run organizations, manage people, and even how we raise our children.
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SAM
- By: Jonathan Waldman
- Narrator: Corey Brill
- Length: 9 hours 10 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2020
- Language: English
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3.64(37 ratings)
3.64(37 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDA true story of innovation that “reads like a movie” (Seth Godin), centered on a scrappy team of engineers–far from the Silicon Valley limelight–and their quest to revolutionize the traditional trade of masonry by building aA true story of innovation that “reads like a movie” (Seth Godin), centered on a scrappy team of engineers–far from the Silicon Valley limelight–and their quest to revolutionize the traditional trade of masonry by building a robot that can lay bricks.
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Humans have landed men on the moon, programmed cars to drive themselves, and put the knowledge of our entire civilization in your back pocket. But no one–from MIT nerds to Army Corps engineers–has ever built a robot that can lay bricks as well as a mason. Unlike the controlled conditions of a factory line, where robots are now ubiquitous, no two construction sites are alike, and a day’s work involves countless variables–bricks that range in size and quality, temperamental mortar mixes, uneven terrain, fickle weather, and moody foremen.
Twenty-five years ago, on a challenging construction job in Syracuse, architect Nate Podkaminer had a vision of a future full of efficient, automated machines that freed bricklayers from the repetitive, toilsome burden of lifting, in bricks, the equivalent of a Ford truck every few days. Offhandedly, he mentioned the idea to his daughter’s boyfriend, and after some inspired scheming, the architect and engineer–soon to be in-laws–cofounded a humble start-up called Construction Robotics. Working out of a small trailer, they recruited a boldly unconventional team of engineers to build the Semi-Automated Mason: SAM. In classic American tradition, a small, unlikely, and eccentric family-run start-up sought to reimagine the behemoth $1 trillion construction industry–the second biggest industry in America–in bootstrap fashion.
In the tradition of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, SAM unfolds as an engineering drama, full of trials and setbacks, heated showdowns between meticulous scientists and brash bricklayers (and their even more opinionated union), and hard-earned milestone achievements. Jonathan Waldman, acclaimed author of Rust, masterfully “reveals a world that surrounds us but mostly eludes our notice” (The Boston Globe). -
Where’s My Jetpack?
- By: Daniel H. Wilson
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 3 hours 41 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2006
- Language: English
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3.41(614 ratings)
3.41(614 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0011.95 USDIt’s the twenty-first century and let’s be honest–things are a little disappointing. Despite every World’s Fair prediction and the advertisements in comic books, we are not living the future we were promised. By now, life wasIt’s the twenty-first century and let’s be honest–things are a little disappointing. Despite every World’s Fair prediction and the advertisements in comic books, we are not living the future we were promised. By now, life was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia, a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? What happened to our moon colonies and servant robots?
InWhere’s My Jetpack?roboticist Daniel H. Wilson takes a hilarious look at the future we imagined for ourselves.You will learn which technologies are already available, who made them, and where to find them. If the technology is not public, you will learn how to build, buy, or steal it. And if doesn’t yet exist, you will learn what stands in the way of making it real. With thirty entries spanning everything from teleportation to self-contained skyscraper cities, Where’s My Jetpack? is an endlessly entertaining, one-of-a-kind look at the world that we always wanted.
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How It Works
- By: Various
- Narrator: Elizabeth Cottle
- Length: 23 minutes
- Publisher: North Star Editions
- Publish date: October 23, 2018
- Language: English
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3(3 ratings)
3(3 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.002.99 USDThis close-up look at the internet and smartphones introduces young listeners to the science and technology that makes these amazing inventions possible. Each audiobook in the set explores the history of these inventions, how they are used today,This close-up look at the internet and smartphones introduces young listeners to the science and technology that makes these amazing inventions possible. Each audiobook in the set explores the history of these inventions, how they are used today, and the potential for their future technological development. With fun facts and engaging discussion topics, this informative series is sure to educate and excite.
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The Internet
- By: Angie Smibert
- Narrator: Elizabeth Cottle
- Length: 12 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: May 22, 2018
- Language: English
Regular Price:Try for $0.002.99 USDIntroduces readers to the science that makes the Internet possible. Accessible text and engaging discussion topcs make this short audiobook an exciting introduction to understanding technology. -
Smartphones
- By: Lisa J. Amstutz
- Narrator: Elizabeth Cottle
- Length: 11 minutes
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media
- Publish date: May 22, 2018
- Language: English
Regular Price:Try for $0.002.99 USDIntroduces readers to the science that makes Smartphones possible. Accessible text and engaging discussion topcs make this short audiobook an exciting introduction to understanding technology.
Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.
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