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American Reference Books Annual 2005
Reference Reviews
Choice
Review from:
American Reference Books
Annual 2005
Those who remember Austrian Hedy Lamarr today most
likely think of her as the sexy Hollywood actress of moderate success in
the 1930s and 1940s who was notorious for having appeared nude in a
European film called Ecstasy in 1931. Few would expect to see her included
as one of the 200 entries in a volume entitled Leaders of the
Information Age. However, she is included in this book and with some
justification, too, since she and avante garde composer George Antheil
received a patent in 1942 for a device to enable radio signals to change
frequencies rapidly. They envisioned this system to be useful in combating
radio-controlled torpedoes used by Nazi submarines. While this system was
never put into practice and the patent lapsed, the idea was later used by
the U.S. military in the 1950s and 1960s. Today the concept is utilized
every day by cellular phones and pagers. All of which means that, in a
quirky way, Hedy Lamarr was a leader of the Information Age.
Editor Weil never explicitly defines the term
Information Age. Judging from the entries, however, he is using the term
broadly. In addition to the expected major figures of computers, there are
entries on Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, music synthesizer inventor
Robert Moog, Vladimir Zworykin who invented the cathode ray tube essential
for the development of television, multimedia pioneer Nicholas Negroponte,
and dot-com entrepreneur Jeff Bezos. Pre-computing theorists, such as
Ramon Llull, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, and Bertrand
Russell, are included as are major inventors and technologists, such as
Johannes Guttenberg, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla,
and William Shockley.
The entries in this reference work are modeled on those
that appear in another H.W. Wilson publication, Current Biography.
They offer a complete biography of the person's life and accomplishments
and are augmented by a photograph or illustration and a brief list of
suggested readings….Many of the names included in this book predate
Current Biography, but some of those unique to this book are
surprising such as World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, Netscape
developer Marc Andreessen, and New Age gadfly Stewart Brand….This
thoroughly researched and well-written volume could prove useful in any
library's reference collection.
Review from: Reference Reviews (UK) Vol. 18,
#7, October 2004
If the names of Babbage and Bell, Marconi and Cray,
Hewlett and Packard, and Turing and Watson evoke computing, electronics,
and the world of information, readers will not be disappointed with this
new biographical work from H. W. Wilson. Their reference stable of such
things is well established, in electronic (e.g. Biography Reference Bank
and World Authors) and print formats (e.g. Current Biography International
Yearbook and Wilson Authors Series). More specifically, "the information
age" evokes Vannevar Bush and Diebold, Licklider and Negroponte, Papert
and Shannon, and they are in
this new work too. The term "information age" is
interpreted widely so as to include historical figures like Gutenberg and
Morse, Napier and Pascal, Caselli (ear1y fax machine) and Jacquard
(punch-card 1oom) and others, who have, directly or indirectly,
contributed to the technology and scientific culture of today's
information society.
This aims to be a reference work for the
small to middle-sized library where information studies, computing,
electronic engineering, and internet-related topics are taught and where
biographical information about key people in the field, and in the history
of the field, is considered relevant. At its semantic centre lie major
figures in "information and computing". It is not a professional "who's
who" of modern practitioners so many well-known academics and gurus do not
appear: it takes much more of a historical perspective, extending back to
figures who contributed to what we know today of information and
computing, as well as key entrepreneurs, like Gates and Bezos, whose
impact on the modern business world of information and computing has been
substantial (and at times controversial). An eclectic constellation of
more generic "scientists" and "thinkers" is provided around this
core-figures like Carlson (xerography), Dick (mimeography), Eastman and
Land (photography) and Ruska (the electron microscope).
Any interpretation of the information age
is certain to throw up the issue of personal choice, about selection,
arrangement and retrieval, At the centre of the book are figures in
computing itself: Cray and Dell, Johnson (disk drives) and Hoff and Kilby
(microchips), Licklider (networking) and Torvalds (Linux), Tomlinson
(e-mail) and Tanenbaum (operating systems). In this sense readers get a
conspectus of key historical developments. This approach is reinforced by
a useful chronological time-line at the end of the book. Complementing
these are the many computer program and software innovators and
developers: Backus (FORTRAN) and Dijkstra (ALGOL), Kemeny (Basic) and
Nelson (Xanadu), Sammet (COBOL) and Thompson (Unix), Wirth (Pascal) and
Ratliff (dBASE). We go into cybernetics with Feigenbaum and Papert, Simon
and Weizenbaum, and Minsky. The foundations of the computer (in
calculating logic machines) are amply represented by Babbage and
Hollerith, Morland and Odhner and Stanhope and Grillet, Boole and Leibniz,
A.N. Whitehead and Russell represent relevant logic and philosophy, but
this is clearly not an intended strength of the book.
The internet is represented by Andreesen
(Netscape) and Baran (packet-switching), Berners-Lee (WWW) and Metcalfe
and (Ethernet), the many involved in developing the ARPANET and then
itself, and in testing its technological capabilities and social impact
(like Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation). A strength of the
book lies in its coverage of entrepreneurs whose flair in commerce has
matched (and sometimes sensationally not matched) their skills in
technology – Gates and Allen (Microsoft), Bezos (Amazon), Ellison
(Oracle), Jobs (Apple and Pixar), Moore (of Intel and Moore’s law fame),
Wang and Warnock (Adobe) and Filo (Yahoo!). A historical slant is provided
by figures like Edison. The wider world of telecommunications and
telephony and media is unevenly covered and this is not a book that can be
relied on to deal with these topics, though entries on Zworykin (cathode
ray tube), de Forest and Matare and Schockley (radio), Keck and Maurer
(optical fibres), and Bell and Edison and Ohm and Tesla (electrical
engineering) are relevant. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke and
William Gibson (Neuromancer of
cyber-fiction) also appears, but the literary side is slim.
David Weil is curator and executive
director of the Computer Museum of America and should not be confused with
David N. Weil, a professor of economics at Brown University in the USA.
Weil’s historical interests come through in this work, which is good in
parts, above all in picking out key figures in the history of computing,
most of them from the twentieth century, and many of them still active in
the computing and information industry today.
Review from: Choice, September
2004
Most of us think the
"information age" can be traced back only 150 years, but Weil (Executive
Director, Computer Museum of America) pushes the era to the 14th century.
Weil supplies biographical sketches of 250 computer scientists,
mathematicians, inventors, physicists, entrepreneurs, philosophers, and
technology pioneers, including Bill Gates, Johannes Gutenberg, Thomas
Edison, Seymour Cray, Johannes Kepler, and some less expected names: Marie
Curie, Shawn Fanning (founder of Napster), and Hedy Lamarr. Curiously,
David Filo and Jerry Yang (inventors of Yahoo!) are included, but Google
creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page are not. Weil does not define
"information age," so his selection of some subjects is puzzling. The two-
to four-page biographies are thorough and detailed, with brief reading
lists that include Web site titles but omit URLs. Many entries include
low-quality photographs of the subjects or their inventions. The book ends
with a time line, 1300-2000, whose arrangement by decade limits its
usefulness. Other works include biographies of these subjects, but
gathering them in one volume helps chronicle the development of modern
technology.
Summing Up:
Recommended. All collections.
Reviewed by S. Nowicki, Kalamazoo
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