Paths of Fire: The Gun and the World It Made

Description

Type “Mikhail Kalashnikov” into Google and the biography of the inventor will come back to you almost at the speed of light. Squeeze the trigger of a Kalashnikov and a bullet is kicked up the barrel by an archaic chemical explosion that would have been quite familiar to Oliver Cromwell or General Custer. The gun—antique, yet contemporary—still dominates the world. Geopolitical events and even consumer culture have been molded by the often-unseen research that firearms evoked. The new science of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton owed much to the Renaissance study of ballistics. But research into making guns and aiming them also brought on the more recent invention of mass production and kickstarted the contemporary field of artificial intelligence. This book follows the history of the gun and its often-unsuspected wider linkages, looking from the first cannons to modern gunnery, and to the yet-to-be-realized electrical futures of rays and beams. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface 1. The Geometry of War 2. The Gun and The Ford 3. The Godfather of Oil 4. High Pheasants in Theory and Practice 5. Fire Control and A New Science of Life 6. Cowboys, Colts and Kalashnikovs 7. From Death Rays to Star Wars References Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgements Index