The Most Powerful Idea in the World

The belief that a person can own an idea, William Rosen argues, drove the invention of the steam engine and with it the whole Industrial Revolution, the first lasting era of economic improvement in history. Rosen, who also wrote Justinian's Flea, studies the engineering and scientific advances that led to the engine. His cast includes the legal thinkers who made such an inventive society possible and the scientists and inventors who built and refined the machine over the centuries, among them Robert Boyle, James Watt and Thomas Newcomen. He looks at how creativity, capital and collaboration came together, and how steam power, running factories, ships and railroads, changed the course of human history.

Bill Gates praised how well it shows thousands of innovations arising from many elements combining, including rising literacy and patents, in a story running roughly from the Newcomen atmospheric engine of 1712 to the Rocket locomotive of 1850.