Five best: books about inventions

William Rosen is the author of The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books about inventions.

One title on the list:

The Soul of a New Machine
by Tracy Kidder

The holy grail for Tom West and his team of computer engineers was a machine that was smaller and nimbler than a mainframe but still able to process 32 bits of information: a superminicomputer. Tracy Kidder chronicled their painstaking quest in one of the more improbable best sellers ever. (A book about writing software code?) But even now "The Soul of a New Machine" is capable of inducing in readers the same sleepless nights that the project demanded of the twentysomething geeks who designed and built the machine they dubbed the Eagle. "The real game is pinball," West tells them. "You win one game, you get to play another; you build this machine, you get to build another."

Read about another book on the list.

See: Tracy Kidder's best books.

--Marshal Zeringue