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This is a book that should be updated and brought back in print. My father credits this book as sparking an interest at age eleven in engineering as a career field. The subtitle is 'The story of engineering from prehistoric times to the present-- with a special chapter on space and rocket engineering.' Because Throm uses a historical approach, the book retains most of its value. Throm first follows the history of engineering, devoting chapters to prehistoric man, ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and Europe in the Middle Ages. Then he examines 'current' engineering by topic: civil engineering, electrical engineering, and so on. Even this information has value, although it obviously should be supplemented by current knowledge. The book includes experiments for the reader to demonstrate the knowledge learned, and the explanations are excellent.