About this Event
31 Inventions that Built Our World
For over 10,000 years, we humans have been busy altering our environment and embracing 'progress', evolving seamlessly from hunter gatherers to the modern urban sophisticates we see ourselves as today.
But what are the ideas and inventions that enabled humanity to become, by the early 21st century, a majority urban species for the first time? How did the essential infrastructure of modern life - the innovations that we barely even notice, but without which our world would fall apart - actually come to be?
With his characteristic wit and boundless curiosity, Jonn Elledge invites us to join him on a fascinating and often surprising tour of the ideas and technologies that made modernity possible. From elevators to electric lighting, parks to pedestrian crossings, he guides us through the history of civilisation itself.
Jonn Elledge
Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist and the author of three books, including the #1 international bestseller A History of the World in 47 Borders. He’s also a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and a number of other newspapers, and has written more than 200 editions of his weekly Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, and spent six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast.
Alistair Pitts
Ally Pitts is a freelance writer and speaker on culture, history, marketing, and neurodiversity from Milton Keynes, and currently based in Oxford.
After completing a history degree at Lancaster University in the mid 2000s, he spent five years working as an English language teacher in Moscow in the first half of the 2010s, leaving in 2014, the year of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. After a brief spell as a museum tour guide at the Lascaris War Rooms in Malta, he moved back to the UK and spent his mid-30s in the historic railway town of Wolverton.
His writing has appeared in outlets including The London Evening Standard, Film Stories Magazine, and Milton Keynes Pulse, and he recently recorded an audio commentary for Eureka Entertainment’s Blu-ray release of the East German 1959 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Tinderbox.
A prolific independent podcaster, and lapsed guitarist, he is also the creator and host of the long running A Russian and Soviet Movie Podcast, the co-host of Gentlemen Don’t Get Caught: A track-by-track R.E.M. podcast, and he regularly introduces films at Oxford’s Ultimate Picture Palace.
Event venue & nearby stays
Blackwell's Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford, United Kingdom
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