Doubleday chronicles the history of everyday inventions that form the foundation of technology now common through the world. While some of the inventions are no longer used, each example shows how inventors contributed to technology through perseverance, inspiration and clever observations. In each chapter, he gives a clear, understandable background of the technology.

Many of the now outdated inventions may have inspired later inventions by meeting emerging demands. For example, Edison's filament bulb is now being phased out by more efficient CFL's, but Edison's contribution to indoor lighting likewise removed the need for inefficient gas-burning lamps. While trains for carrying m...

Abner Doubleday was a busy man. He rose to be a major general during the American Civil War, started the first cable car company in San Francisco, and is credited (though perhaps erroneously) with inventing the game of baseball.

In 1861, he had the distinction as a captain to be second-in-command of Ft. Moultrie, one of the harbor defenses of Charleston, SC.. When that state seceded from the Union, Doubleday and the garrison of artillerists manning the fort were cut off from supplies and reinforcements. Through a tumultuous period, during which the command transferred to Ft. Sumter and soon found the Secessionists building batteries all around it, Doubleday had an additional ta...

Белые ночи (”White Nights”) by Fyodor Dostoevsky [read in Russian]. In this small 100kb story (though author states this is a sentimental novel) author describes in his traditional and particular way the internal world of one young lonely person.
The hero’s 26 years old man, who is oriented into his internal world, who’s rather shy, and thus is in real demand of a soulful conversations and love. The action take place in the city of a real and deep sentiments and romance — Saint Petersburg, the most romantic and European city in Russia. Not only the location is important, but also a time of a day: all actions in the story take place in evening and night time — the famous time of wh...

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a sophisticated novell with extremely hard to comprehend philosophical ideas lying on the border of paranoia, orthodoxal believing of God and psychological researches on human nature. Every sentence sounds like a sort of revelation to an unprepared reader’s mind and causes a deep flashback thoughts which are impossible to get rid of, which also require an immediate solution.
Though it’s hard to define precisely what kind of content presented in novell but one can say it is a sort of impossible mixture of traditional Dostoevsky’s ideas of loneliness, ideas of internal human confilct, ideas of freedom and interhuman relationship.
R...

White Nights and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a compilation published in 1918 by The MacMillan Company, NY (USA) and Heinemann (UK). It contains these 7 works:
- White Nights
- Notes from the Underground
- A Faint Heart
- A Christmas Tree and a Wedding
- Polzunkov
- A Little Hero
- Mr. Prohartchin

The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society.
The teeming St Petersburg community he enters is far from receptive to an innocent like himself, despite some early successes and relentless pursuit by grotesque fortune-hunters. His naive gaucheries give rise to extreme reactions among his new acquaintance, ranging from anguished protectiveness to mockery and contempt.
But even before reaching the city, during the memorable train journey that opens the novel, he has encountered the demonic Rogozhin, the son of a ...

"Der Großinquisitor" ist eine Erzählung aus dem Roman "Die Brüder Karamasow". Die Handlung spielt im 16. Jahrhundert, in Sevilla. Jesus, auf die Erde zurückgekehrt, wird von einem greisen Großinquisitor verhaftet und soll auf dem Scheiterhaufen verbrannt werden.
(Introduction by Al-Kadi)