Technology History

• Book: Richard Rhodes, Visions of Technology (1999). A sample of 20th century writings about technology's impact.
• Book: anything by Henry Petroski (Invention by Design, for example)
• Book: Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers (1999)
• Book: Frances and Joseph Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages(1994). Too often we think that nothing of merit happened in the Middle Ages--not so.
• Book: William Manchester, A World Lit only by Fire: the Medieval Mind and the Renaissance (1993)
• Book: John Lienhard, The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture (2000). See also Lienhard's radio program .
• Book: Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880--1918 (1983), a study of technology during this period.
• Book: Robert Lucky, Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine (1989).  Good history of telephony from the head of Bell Labs.
• Book: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (1999).  A Pulitzer prize-winning look at the forces that shaped ancient cultures.
• Book: Claude Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (University of California Press, 1992).
• Mag: my favorite magazine of technology history is American Heritage of Invention & Technology .
• Mag: The Society for the History of Technology produces Technology and Culture magazine.  Rather academic, but valuable.
• Mag: National Geographic has their entire collection (back to 1888) available on CD.  There are many articles about the early days of various technologies.
• Web: The Making of America site has a great online collection of late 1800s books and magazines. 
• Web: The Dallas Federal Reserve has some surprisingly interesting and informative annual reports, which often talk about technology's impact in America.

Technology (General)

• Book: Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995). The biological parallels to the Internet, and much more.
• Book: Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995).  The biological parallels to the Internet, and much more.
• Book: Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety (1989).  Insights into information.
• Book: Russell Ackoff, The Art of Problem Solving (1978).  Great stories and insights about social problems, often involving technology.
• Book: Nicholas Carr, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage(2004).  A controversial book arguing that computers have become commodities.
• Book: Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences(1996).  Sometimes technology implementations don't work out as we plan--here's why.
• Book: John Gall, Systemantics.  A somewhat pessimistic (or realistic?) view of how systems operate.
• Book: Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (2002).  A great book about design that teaches much about our interface with technology because it ignores technology and focuses on everyday things--doors, faucets, switches, and so on.
• Web: the How Stuff Works site has a large collection of summaries of how things work.
• Web: the Unabomber Manifesto (1995). Though written by someone who killed and injured with letter bombs, the concerns about technology's negative impact are justified.

Technology News

• Mag: some excellent technology magazines: Technology Review, Scientific American, Wired, Smithsonian, New Scientist, Discover
• Mag: Issues in Science and Technology .  Rather academic.
• Email: the best technology newsletter is the Wired newsletter
• Radio: NPR's Science Friday
• TV: The History Channel

Market Success of Technology Products

• Book: Ira Flatow, They All Laughed... From Light Bulbs to Lasers: The Fascinating Stories Behind the Great Inventions That Have Changed Our Lives (1993)
• Book: Neil Steinberg, Complete & Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runners-Up, Never-Weres (1994)
• Book: William Shanklin, Six Timeless Marketing Blunders (1988).
• Book: Charles Panati, Panati'’s Parade of Fads, Follies, and Manias: The Origins of Our Most Cherished Obsessions (1991)
• Book: Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985).  This is my favorite business book.
• Book: Karl Marx, Capital (German edition 1867, English edition 1886). Drucker says that Karl Marx "had the keenest appreciation of technology--he was the first and is still one of the best historians of technology."  Capital is quite long, but chapter 15 ("Machinery and Modern Industry")gives a good snapshot of the machines and conditions of the Industrial Revolution.
• Book: Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working-Class in England (1845). A chilling condemnation of the working conditions in Industrial Revolution England by a factory owner.
• Book: Steven Schnaars, Megamistakes (1989).  A good summary of the history of technology prediction.
• Book: Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (5th edition, 2003).  The classic study of how innovations diffuse through society.

Future Studies

• Book: Ray Kurzweil is a prolific cheerleader for the exponential-change viewpoint. He has written several books on this topic, including The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999).  Also see www.kurzweilai.net/index.html.
• Book: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970).  This is the granddaddy of the future studies genre.
• Web: World Future Society and their magazine The Futurist.
• Book: James Gleick, Faster: the Acceleration of Just About Everything (1999).
• Web: The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999). This was an influential sketch of how the Internet changes society.

Thinking

• Book: anything by Michael Shermer, such as Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (2002).
• Book: anything by A. K. Dewdney, such as Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science (1998)
• Book: anything by John Allen Paulos, such as A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995)
• Book: Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (2001).  Better thinking through interesting illustrations.
• Mag: Skeptic magazine.  Laudable attacks on unsupported thinking.
• Web: Global Ideas Bank.  The ideas here are about social innovations.
• Book: Cecil Adams, many Straight Dope books plus an informative web site (www.straightdope.com)  

Trivia Books

There's a category of books that, for lack of a better term, can be called "trivia" books. Lots of intriguing facts, often about technology.

• Book: Wallace and Wallechinsky, Significa (1983)
• Book: Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts (1979)
• Book: the Bathroom Reader series (www.bathroomreader.com)

Statistics

Statistics might be boring, but they can be essential when trying to prove an argument about technology trends, changes, and so on.  Here are a few good sites.

• Web: The Consumer Electronics Association has good sales statistics on its industry
• Web: Statistical Abstract of the United States
• Web: eMarketer has an interesting newsletter with the latest on Internet trends
• Mag: American Demographics magazine