BACKWARD SCIENCE

A reverse history of watershed inventions, from smartphone to scratch plow.

Headed by a series of perfunctory invitations to think about what life would have been like before the arrival of modern (or any) conveniences, Gifford harks back in irregular and often overlapping chunks of time to a standard-issue array of technological breakthroughs. Though he does give African American inventor Granville T. Woods a nod and occasionally challenges received narratives by, for instance, crediting both Eli Whitney and Catherine Green with the invention of the cotton gin and Frenchman Honoré Blanc (rather than Whitney) for interchangeable gun parts, nearly all the figures he names worked in the U.K., or at least Europe, until he reaches the ancient Chinese invention of the compass. Wilson follows suit, mixing stiff-looking individual portraits of pale- and eventually olive-skinned inventors with larger views of racially diverse groups or crowds in, mostly, period European settings. Her depictions of a gory pre-anesthesia surgery and toilets through the ages are amusing, but along with medieval scribes laboring over pre-illuminated manuscripts, the nonfunctional versions of a printing press, catapult, and early cannon on display show a low priority for technical accuracy. The author closes with a glittering promise that new techno-wonders are on the way; a timeline that cuts off in 2008 sends a different message.

Needs more than a gimmick to rise above its superficial content. Look elsewhere.