The inventions of one generation explained to the next: wireless, the telephone and phonograph, the submarine, animated pictures, liquid air, the horseless carriage and the first flying machines. Archibald Williams wrote it at the turn of the century, when every one of these was still startling. The book is a good measure of what a well-informed reader understood before the war changed all of it. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Turner and Menzel show the Nova Reperta inventions, from printing to eyeglasses, matching Williams's account of how each new machine remade the world.