Taking examples from across the years and across the world, from Icarus's fatal flight to the problems of noisy lavatories in Japan, and from Turner's paintings to the electric chair, this book sets out to illustrate what has made, and makes, our high-tech world tick. Using scientists, technologists, economists, designers, marketeers, philosophers and social historians, it traces the development of technological innovation and finds that this has often come from the margins, rather than the centres, of social power; that technology, like art, is culturally specific; and that technologies have a style of their own. The book also investigates the political implications of mass production and the fraught relationship between technology and science, as well as considering the huge potential of information technology.