The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible--and Other Journeys Through Knowledge

James Burke. The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys Through Knowledge. Boston: Little Brown, 1996.

James Burke shows us, in an instructive and entertaining way, that knowledge has many unforeseen and surprising effects. The book, for example, owes its existence to a mistake made by German jeweler Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. The lamp you may be using started life four hundred years ago, thanks to Italian miners whose problems ultimately resulted in the vacuum inside early light bulbs. And, as the subtitle indicates, renaissance water...