I’d thought that this book might be a rehash of many stories I’d read elsewhere but was surprised by the amount of tales I’d never heard of that I found here. A couple of the stories that have stuck in my head are the one about how the Irish economy survived a six month bank strike in 1970 by using cheques and IOUs as a makeshift system of tradable debt, and how one of Selfridge’s novel visions for his department store was adding ladies loos so that women would stay and shop for longer. Even if you know these stories and others, there are many more than fifty interesting things in this book, each chapter has numerous examples and the book flows swiftly and interestingly by. It’s important to note that there’s no definite article in the title; these are fifty things that can definitely be shown to have made our world what it is today, but there’s no claim that they are the only ones or even the top fifty. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a sequel to this with another fifty things at some point.