This truly remarkable book, with its truly unremarkable title, is a page turner. Here, for example, in the engineer-author’s untechnical language, is a sample of its contents that is both amusing and revealing: “It is said to have been Cardinal Richelieu’s disgust with a frequent dinner guest’s habit of picking his teeth with the pointed end of his knife that drove the prelate to order all the points of his table knives ground down.” Not only does this book tell us about the evolution of familiar artifacts such as flatware, but it also tells us about the multitudes who designed and used them. Quoting from The Evolution of Technology by George Basalla, the author provides us another wonderful anecdote: “In 1867 Karl Marx was surprised to learn . . . that five hundred different kinds of hammers were produced in Birmingham, England, each one adapted to a specific function in industry or the crafts.” This kind of information is fascinating, not in spite of, but because of, the familiar things it talks about.

The Evolution of Useful Things is as much a social history as it is a technological treatise, a description that also applies to Henry Petroski’s previous books, The Pencil and To Engineer Is Human. All relate to everyday objects rather than to exotic ones—how pins turned into paper clips; how styrofoam containers for hamburgers evolved; and how “Post-it” Notes came about. The list is endless, and it is easy to imagine that the author