Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences

Essays by international bestselling author Edward Tenner that explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity

How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals as investors, and how do dog breeds become national symbols? Why have scientific breakthroughs so often originated in the study of shadows? How did the file card prepare scholarship and commerce for the rise of electronic data processing, and why did the visual metaphor of the tab survive into today's graphic interfaces? Why have Amish artisans played an important role in manufacturing advanced technology? Why was United Shoe Machinery the Microsoft of the 1890s? Surprises like these, Edward Tenner believes, can help us deal with the technological issues that confront us now.

Since the 1980s, Edward Tenner has contributed essays on technology, design, and culture to leading magazines, newspapers, and professional journals, and has been interviewed on subjects ranging from medical ethics to typography. Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge--named for one of the paradoxes that can result from the inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing--brings many of Tenner's essays together into one volume for the first time, accompanied by new introductions by the author on the theme of each work. As an independent historian and public speaker, Tenner has spent his career deploying concepts from economics, engineering, psychology, science, and sociology, to explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity.

Author: Edward Tenner
Publisher: American Philosophical Society Press
Published: 04/08/2025
Pages: 585
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.45lbs
Size: 9.13h x 6.06w x 2.05d
ISBN: 9781606180273

About the Author
Edward Tenner is a Distinguished Scholar of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University History Department. He also has held visiting research positions in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Pennsylvania, and in the Princeton departments and programs of Geosciences, English, Information Technology Policy, and has taught seminars in the Princeton Humanities Council and the Freshman Seminars Program. He published his first book, Tech Speak or How to Talk High Tech: An Advanced Post-Vernacular Discourse Modulation Protocol in 1986 while still a book acquisition editor at Princeton University Press. He left the Press to accept a Guggenheim award in 1991. The resulting book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, became an international bestseller and was followed by Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (2003) and The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do (2018). He has been an international speaker at academic, government, and corporate meetings.