War Inventions

The end of Communism and breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of euphoria around the world, but Russia today is violently anti-American and dangerously nationalistic. So how did we go from the promise of those days to the autocratic police state of Putin's new Russia? The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the Cold War to tell the story of the fight for the soul of a nation.

What do the world’s superpowers get up to in their secret underground bunkers? UNDERGROUND BASES: Subterranean Military Facilities and the Cities Beneath Our Feet, by novelists, filmmakers and independent researchers James Morcan & Lance Morcan, details confirmed and rumored underground facilities in the United States and around the world. Containing rare photographic evidence throughout as well as little-known quotes from key government figures, it makes a compelling case for there being an enormous hidden world under the Earth's surface. The Morcans speculate that the covert underground...

The Fascinating History of GPS: How a Cold War Invention Changed the Way We Navigate the World by Revin Laxtor is a captivating exploration of one of humanity’s most transformative achievements—the Global Positioning System. In an age where a simple blue dot on a smartphone can guide us effortlessly across continents, it’s easy to forget how recently this technology was born and how profoundly it has reshaped our world. This book takes readers on a remarkable journey through time, science, and ingenuity, revealing how a Cold War innovation became the invisible force powering modern life.

In Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces", organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into Eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than one and a half million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar.

A gripping new history of the summer when a handful of fighter pilots, a wall of radio towers, and a room full of telephones turned back Hitler. This is a commentary on the story of how Britain survived 1940: not by brute force, but by building a system that could see, decide, and strike in time. From the first flicker of a radar return at Daventry to the chaos of Adlertag and the contrails of 15 September, The Battle of Britain reveals the hidden backbone of victory. Robert Watson-Watt’s experiments, the Chain Home network, WAAF plotters, the Observer Corps, and the nerve centers of ...

The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years. Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the...

"In this oddly entertaining audiobook, narrator Pete Cross takes listeners through the many experiments and devices created by the R&D branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII... Listeners will be both transfixed and horrified by the decisions weighed, and taken." - AudioFile...

Lieutenant Gilbert Maltravers is bored. It is 1912 and he has been promoted as fast as any in his Dartmouth class and is placed in a battleship where he can confidently look forward to promotion to post captain and a battleship of his own by the time he is forty. All he needs to do is keep a smart ship, polish the brass and salute every senior officer, while wearing an expensive uniform that testifies he is one of the right sort. His father is an admiral, so very little can go wrong.

The International Spy Museum's Historian takes us on a wild tour of missions and schemes that almost happened, but were ultimately deemed too dangerous, expensive, ahead of their time, or even certifiably insane. "Compulsively readable laugh out loud history." —Mary Roach, New York...

Welcome to the 2024 edition! You have a wonderful idea and want to make it real. What are the first steps? Many forces act on you to slow you down, but your imagination, creativity, and passion need to overcome these constraints. INTENSE DESIGN presents a time in history when great ideas became great products such as the SR-71 Blackbird. How did an organization shrug off all the problems associated with Mach 3 travel? INTENSE DESIGN considers the historical moderation and guidance of a successful design operation as well as providing practical advice for making designs come to reality. This...

The untold story of the battle for the laser—a technology that powers our modern world. In 1957, a brilliant yet unassuming physicist named Gordon Gould imagined a device that could amplify light into a perfectly focused beam. He called it the laser. Within a few short years, lasers would revolutionize everything from medicine to manufacturing, communications to entertainment. But while the world celebrated, Gould was left in the shadows. His patent was classified by the U.S. government, his work buried under Cold War secrecy. Rival scientists and corporate giants rushed ahead, taking ...

From the barren rocks of Aden to the west coast of Ireland, the war under the sea is subverting the certainties of the Victorian Navy. While the dreadnoughts hide away at Scapa Flow and Kiel, the submarines and small ships of both sides are taking the war to the enemy coast. The Royal Navy is at war with itself and, as in any civil war, the conflict is merciless. Gilbert Maltravers takes his tiny E Class boat to war against both navies in this final book of the trilogy.

The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban history. Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation.

Have you ever wondered how one man imagined an entire electrical world before the world itself understood electricity? This Codex takes you straight into the mind of Nikola Tesla in a way ordinary biographies never manage. You do not watch his breakthroughs from far away. You feel them. You see the moment a quiet walk in a city park gives birth to the rotating magnetic field and you follow the rush of triumph at Niagara Falls and you watch the Tesla Coil rise from a simple thought into a machine that shook the scientific world. This is the story of how imagination turns into engineering. ...

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia met in the Battle of Hampton Roads—the first time ironclad vessels would engage each other in combat. For four hours the two ships pummeled one another as thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians watched from the shorelines. Although the battle ended in a draw, this engagement would change the nature of naval warfare by informing both vessel design and battle tactics.

James Campbell Knight and his family time travel into the past the way ordinary families go on trips to vacation spots. When a computer virus takes over the controls of the time machine, the world faces the end of civilization when the time machine falls into the wrong hands.

The grand spectacle that marked America’s first century—and a moment of reckoning for a nation in flux “Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes.” Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10...

From Satellites to Side Streets: How GPS Transformed the World and Changed the World What began as a Cold War military project is now the invisible force powering your smartphone, your car, your farm equipment—and even your bank account. From Satellites to Side Streets tells the remarkable story of how the Global Positioning System (GPS) evolved from a secret Pentagon initiative into a global utility woven into every aspect of modern life. In this engaging and deeply researched book, author Kevin Shelton explores the origins, engineering, and astonishing reach of GPS. From battlefield ...

My Tank Is Fight! contains a humorous and exciting examination of 20 real inventions from World War II that never saw the light of day. Each entry includes full technical details, a complete development history, in-depth analysis, and a riveting fictionalized account of the invention's success or failure on the battlefield.

Entering World War II, America was emerging as a world power. Their geographic isolation from World War I allowed them to recover and prosper in the interwar era, and food invention during the Depression carried into World War II. Food items such as SPAM and M&Ms profoundly impacted the military, and were later incorporated into some American dishes after the war.