by Gerard K. O’Neill (1983) (ISBN: 0-671-55437-9)

From the back cover:

Although traditional American industry has lost its lead to Japan and other competitors, newly emerging technologies provide opportunities for American entrepreneurial genius to score a comeback if those opportunities are seized and pursued. In The Technology Edge, noted physicist Gerard K. O’Neill describes six of those amazing future-technologies: robotics, microengineering, genetic engineering, magnetic levitation trains, inexpensive “family airplanes,” and solar energy-powered industry in space. In additional chapters he analyzes Japan’s industrial methods and the American success story of Silicon Valley. “My immediate concern, ” writes O’Neill, “is the economic survival of our nation in a time of unprecedented challenge from abroad.”

“A wide-ranging, informed discussion of new technologies… His remarkable achievement in the last third of the book is to provide an engineer’s view of American capitalism. With anecdotes and analysis, O’Neill shows how the venture capitalists pick companies, how the engineers turn ideas into products, how many people get rich in the process, how the success of some stimulates the ideas of many more… All of The Technology Edge is valuable, but the last two chapters should be required reading for legislators and academicians.”
-Thomas G. Donla, Barron’s

“Strong claims, but amply backed up.”
-Los Angeles Times

“O’Neill’s comprehensive knowledge is more than evident here, and what’s even better, he shares it with the reader in understandable prose.”
-Chicago Booklist