Category: The Third Book

The March of Progress

After starting work on my third book in January 2023, I’ve been making steady progress. With initial drafts of the first five chapters now done and dusted (out of a planned total of eight), I’m currently more than halfway through and anticipating completion towards the end of 2025. As reported in my previous post, the subject of the book is the history of music technology. However, it won’t cover the development of acoustic musical instruments as there are many excellent books available on that subject already. Instead, it will concentrate on the application of mechanical, electrical and electronic technology to music.

You can get an impression of the scope of the book from the chapter headings:-

  1. The Mechanical Age
  2. Understanding Sound
  3. Sound Recording and Reproduction
  4. Electromechanical and Electromagnetic Instruments
  5. The Electrification of the Guitar
  6. Analogue Electronic Instruments
  7. The Advent of the Electronic Synthesiser
  8. The Digital Revolution

Although the writing hasn’t gotten any easier third time around, I’ve found that conducting the research for this latest book has been eased slightly due to an increase in the amount of source material available online. When writing my first book, The Story of the Computer: A Technical and Business History, which I started working on in 2003, I relied heavily on the physical collections of the University of Glasgow library for my research, as much of the source material required was not available online at that time. With my second book, The Story of the Robot: A Short History of Automation and Robotics, which I started working on in 2017, the situation had improved considerably but I still had to seek out physical copies of some of the source material. This time around I’ve been able to find almost everything I need online which has saved me a huge amount of time in carrying out my research.

One of the most useful online resources has been the Internet Archive, a web archive and digital library founded by the American internet entrepreneur Brewster Kahle. It’s absolutely huge and well worth checking out if you are carrying out any research of your own.

That Difficult Third Album

Having completed and published both the paperback and eBook versions of The Story of the Robot in July last year after nearly 3 years of effort, I was in no hurry to start another writing project. I’d succeeded in proving to myself that I could write a second book. Also, having covered the two areas of technology which I can claim some expertise in (computers and automation systems), I reckoned I had run out of suitable topics to cover.

However, there was one piece of unfinished business. When writing my first book, The Story of the Computer: A Technical and Business History, I’d omitted planned chapters on supercomputers and portable computers in order to keep the overall length of the book manageable. Perhaps one of these could be the subject of a new book?

I quickly ruled out supercomputers. Supercomputing is a highly specialised subject and my experience of it is limited so a full-length book on its origins and evolution would be a tall order for me and probably also of little interest to potential readers. That left portable computers.

I have to confess to disliking portable computing devices. I get frustrated by their tiny virtual or physical keyboards, miniscule screens and absence of a decent pointing device. I don’t actually want to compose an e-mail while walking down the street or in the back seat of a taxi. I’d rather do it from the comfort of my desk, where I can give the task my full attention without fear that my user experience will be severely compromised by the Lilliputian nature of the equipment. Despite this, I can’t help marvelling at the ingenuity of their design and the enormous effort that has gone into their development.

Therefore, in August 2022 I began scoping out a book on the history of portable computing technology with the working title ‘A Moving Story‘. After a few weeks of intensive research I had a rough outline of the new book, complete with chapter headings, subheadings and bullet points for content. The next stage would be to take each chapter outline and expand it into working draft but I now realised that I’d be going over much of the same old ground as The Story of the Computer, as portable computers are still computers after all, and this dampened my enthusiasm considerably. I needed to find a different subject if I was to have any hope of writing a third book, a subject that I had both the enthusiasm for and sufficient knowledge of.

In September 2022 I attended a reunion of former colleagues from the University of Glasgow. During a conversation with one of my oldest ex-colleagues, I mentioned my struggle to find a suitable subject for a third book. Knowing that I was a keen amateur musician with an abiding interest in the technological aspects of music making, he suggested the history of music technology. After mulling this suggestion over for a couple of months, I decided that it was indeed the right subject for my next book.

I’ve now completed an outline for the new book, which has the working title ‘Turn Up the Volume‘, and have started work on the first draft of Chapter 1. Music technology overlaps with automation and computing at several points in its history, which gives the book a sense of continuity with the two earlier books while remaining a standalone work. Progress was slow to begin with due to the large amount of background research required for a “new” subject but is now accelerating rapidly as my enthusiasm builds. The target date for completion is early 2026 so watch this space!