Ever wonder what makes stamps stick or trumpets toot? Not a business book per se, How Things are Made explores these and other manufacturing mysteries for mainstream products such as nail polish and watches to the more obscure, including seismographs and optical fibers. Rose, a business consultant who likes to take things apart and put them back together, and co-author Schlager, a chemical engineer with an extensive career in running factory operations, provide an entertaining, informative synopsis of over thirty products. The book's denim print cover cleverly entices with some quick facts on blue jeans.
Chapters are organized alphabetically and provides a history of each product's inventor and patents, design requirements, materials involved in assembly, and what products may be developed in the future. Illustrations and boxes highlight interesting facts and figures about a product's evolution. For instance, the guitar might possibly have evolved from early hunters who liked the musical sound of their bowstrings. Jet engines can take up to two years to assemble because they have almost 25,000 parts. Even contact lenses have a historical significance as an idea originally generated by Leonardo DaVinci.
The material allows readers to explore and discover something new about more common products like rubber bands and salsa, while also learning about more complex technical items such as lawn mowers and bar code scanners. The book concludes with a concise list of additional resources for each product for those who'd like to learn more. (In case you're still wondering, stamps stick because adhesives are applied to the paper prior to printing the images; and trumpets toot by a combination of air and lip vibration.)S.J. Johnston