Due to reasons, I’m very late posting the exciting fact that my latest book, How Things Work: The Inner Life of Everyday Machines, is finally out! Several Weeks ago!

You can get autographed copies from my website, or regular copies much cheaper from Amazon, or right now from your local bookseller. Barnes & Nobel even has it on a table in the middle of their stores.

This is my first book in a long, long time that isn’t about chemistry, so it’s a bit of a risk for me. (There’s already one sourpuss review on Amazon, from a chemist who apparently didn’t like it.)

I’ve loved mechanical things for at least as long as I’ve been interested in chemistry, and it’s a topic I feel very comfortable writing about. (And in counterbalance to the bad review, boingboing.net called it “another masterpiece”.)

I think this book will appeal to what I believe is an underserved minority: people who don’t feel comfortable with people, and much prefer the company of things. Depending on how I’m feeling, that describes me today, and it certainly did when I was growing up.

The book includes five main chapters, plus a few more personal stories in between. The first one is, I admit, a bit random: It’s a chapter about things with clear cases. Telephones, televisions (flat screen and old-school), musical instruments, computers, hair driers, etc, etc. A wide range of products are available with transparent plastic cases that let you see the beautiful inner workings, not only when you’ve taken the thing apart, but while it is in operation. Clear telephones have been around for decades, but I bet you didn’t know that there’s a whole world of clear-case consumer products you’ve never seen, and that exist for a reason you’ll never guess.

Clear telephones are just for fun, but clear hair driers and radios? They exist only because of bad people. To be more specific, they exist because of prisons, and the need to prevent the people in them from hiding things inside the cases of whatever electronic devices they are allowed to keep in their cells.

The next three chapters focus on specific categories of mechanical devices: Locks, Clocks, and Scales. Each chapter explains how different versions of the devices work, how they are made, and how they have changed over the years (more like millennia, since each of these devices have existed for thousands of years).

The last chapter is about how to make a potholder, no cheating. By that I mean starting at the beginning with cotton seeds and doing all the steps to a finished potholder by hand (in many cases using tools I made myself). Along the way I show not only how I made my potholder, but also how various stages of ginning, spinning, and weaving are done commercially in the US, China, and Germany.

This book is basically a love letter to mechanical things. I love them, and if you love them too, or know someone who you think might, get this book and you’ll find a lot to like in it.

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My New Book, How Things Work, is Out!