Ask HN: Favourite science history book of the 20th century?

"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan - that book was a life changer for me and has been with me ever since.

James Burke's book version of 'Connections' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55024.Connections

Also Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs', described as "Here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2748.Microserfs

Turing's cathedral, on the invention and development of the earliest digital computers just before, during, and after WWII. Lots of excellent detail, descriptions of the personalities and relationships of many interesting people, like von Neumann.

Might sound silly but I LOVE: Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections. They single handedly made me interested in how things were made, how things were on the inside. How things were engineered.

Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" is an insider's (Manhattan Project, Bell Labs) view of how computer science as we know it developed.

Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford and Critical Path by R Buckminster Fuller

The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut. It’s a fictionalised biography of John von Nuemann and the birth of artificial intelligence. Amazing , surreal and unique

The Faber Book of Science (Carey) Asimov’s New Guide to Science (Asimov) The Great Influenza (Barry)

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Summa Technologiae