The Way Things Work

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The Way Things Work is a 1988 nonfiction book by

A revised and updated version, The New Way Things Work, released on October 26, 1998, contains additional text on the workings of computers and digital technology. A number of pages were dropped, among them a two-page demonstration of a mechanical coin-operated parking meter and the original descriptions of computing. The original's computing section included four pages explaining the workings and the distinctions between a calculator and a general-purpose computer, and four pages on binary arithmetic, logical AND and OR gates, and how these are assembled into a half adder and full adder; these were replaced with entirely new art and more detailed descriptions, with a longer story, 'The Last Mammoth', depicting a lonely mammoth invited to visit the 'Digital Domain' by its proprietor Bill,^[2] which uses the mammoth's assistance and a humorous pumpkin-and-apple-based mechanical computer to create a video depiction of a community of mammoths. Like the previous version, a CD-ROM version was released.

A substantially revised edition, The Way Things Work Now, was published in October 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Dorling Kindersley.

Contents for The New Way Things Work

• Part One — The Mechanics of Movement:
  Screws, Rotating Wheels, Springs, Friction
• Part Two — Harnessing the Elements: Introduction,
  Nuclear Power
• Part Three — Working with Waves: Introduction, Light and Images, Photography, Printing, Sound and Music, Telecommunications
• Part Four — Electricity and Automation: Introduction, Electricity, Magnetism, Sensors and Detectors
• Part Five — The Digital Domain: Making
  Bits
  , Storing Bits, Processing Bits, Sending Bits, Using Bits, Epilogue
• Eureka! — The Invention of Machines

With a glossary of technical terms and an index at the back of the book. While the individual sections and subsections are changed in The Way Things Work Now, the structure and Table of Contents remain the same.

Publishing history

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (February 2011)

• ISBN 0-590-42989-2
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• ISBN 0-395-42857-2
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• ISBN 0-395-93847-3
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• ISBN 1-4053-0238-0
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• ISBN 0-2412-8219-5
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• ISBN 1-3286-6310-8
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• Clarion Books, 2023.
  ISBN 0-544-82438-5
  .