Steve Jones has supposedly devoted No Need for Geniuses to the astonishing advances made by French scientists of the late 18th century in subjects ranging from the isolation of chemical elements to the understanding of human metabolism to the physics of electricity. The era’s remarkable technical innovations included the metric system, ballooning, the invention of canned food, and the semaphore telegraph. But Jones uses these subjects only as starting points for a series of enjoyable rambles through the history of modern science as a whole. While each of his nine chapters involves an episode from the French revolution, Jones quickly wanders away from it, as one interesting and obscure fact reminds him of another, and that of another in turn.

Source: No Need for Geniuses by Steve Jones review – astonishing scientific advances | Books | The Guardian