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Fact-checked by engineers
Hand-drawn illustrations
Co-authored with Pulitzer-nominated author
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This book is a
creative encyclopedia
Every invention you use today beat a hundred others to get there. The atmospheric train lost to the steam engine or self-pouring teapot lost to the ordinary kettle. We went looking for the ones that didn’t make it, drew them out and gathered them into one beautiful book you can actually hold.
Chapters to explore
Inside The Black Book you’ll find several worlds of human ingenuity that almost happened.
Land transport
This chapter is a parade of land-transport inventions that didn’t stick around, not because their creators lacked intelligence, but because their ideas asked humans to change in ways humans rarely do. These failures remind us that progress is not a straight road but a crowded intersection of desire, habit, fear, and infrastructure.
Household
Household is where invention gets intimate. Big ideas shrink down until they fit in drawers, under beds, and beside sinks. These inventions show us not just what people wanted to do at home, but what they desperately wanted to avoid: lifting, waiting, washing, worrying, and being inconvenienced by the small realities of everyday life.
Aviation
This chapter is about those moments when aviation looked at birds, physics, and common sense, nodded politely, and then did something else entirely. These are flying machines that worked just well enough to prove the idea wasn’t insane, but not well enough to survive contact with regulators, accountants, or gravity for very long.
Style
Personal style is where the private self becomes public fact, and this chapter collects every invention that tried to engineer that transition. These inventions reveal the final truth of personal style: it isn’t just how you look. It’s how you move through the world, what you’re trying to protect, and how much trouble you’re willing to endure to feel, for a moment, a little more in control.
Entertainment
Entertainment has always liked to dress itself up as magic, and this chapter shows what the magic is actually made of: gears, wires, smoke, and the occasional human tucked out of sight. These inventions share one truth: the magic is real, but only because someone engineered it that way.
Noah charney
Pulitzer Prize-nominated author. Art historian. Founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. Noah has written for The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. He has published many books on art, forgery, and the ideas history quietly left out.
Pulitzer Prize Nominee, Author of 30+ books
Professor at Yale and at the Smithsonian
TV Presenter and Award-Winning Podcaster
From concept to completion
Behind the scenes
Created with engineers
This book was created together with professional engineers. It draws on patent archives and first-hand engineering experience.
Well-researched content
Every invention in this book is real, every claim is checked, and every story is sourced. The facts are as surprising as the machines themselves.
Hand-drawn illustrations
Every image you see in the book was created by hand, from the first pencil line to the final print. Just intention and hundreds of hours of work that make each spread worth stopping at.
