Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny, & Perpetual Motion/John Biggs

Descriere

"Marie Antoinette's Watch is a wonderful book." - William Gibson, author of Neuromancer. Across continents and into and out of the hands of royalty, revolutionaries, smugglers, thieves, and the world's greatest tech engineers, was Marie Antoinette's watch, the "160," worth an estimated $40 million in today's dollars. Perhaps the most sought after personal technology device of the last 200 years, the timepiece, designed by the legendary Abraham-Louis Breguet, is the launching point for a thrilling and fluidly woven set of narratives that are, in part, forbidden love story, historical document, and police procedural. Marie Antoinette's Watch also deftly lays out the history of horology and the 18th Century engineering feats attained in Paris's answer to Silicon Valley, the le de la Cit , that made the watch the most intricate and prized personal device of its time - something that's come full circle today. In the hands of Techcrunch's East Coast Editor, John Biggs, Marie Antoinette's Watch is by turns edifying and lurid, historical and utterly modern. Culminating in a heist in a Tel Aviv antiquities museum in the 1980s, Biggs tells the story of how one object can transform countries, cultures, high technology, and time itself. About the Author: John Biggs lives in Brooklyn, NY and writes books. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Gizmodo, Men's Health, Popular Science, Sync, The Stir and he's written multiple books including Black Hat and Bloggers Boot Camp. He is also writing a young adult series about a secret train system called Mytro.