author
Paul Severing
A writer from the early 20th century, best known for introducing readers to the wonders of new technology at a time when flight, wireless communication, and radium still felt astonishingly new. His work captures the excitement of an age racing into modern science.
1 Audiobook
Marvels of Modern Science
by Paul Severing
About the author
Little reliable biographical information about Paul Severing is easy to confirm today, but he is credited as the author of Marvels of Modern Science, published in 1910. The book was also issued with Theodore Waters as editor, and it set out to give general readers a lively overview of the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the time.
In that book, Severing wrote about subjects that would have seemed thrillingly modern to his first audience, including flying machines, wireless telegraphy, radium, moving pictures, and skyscrapers. Read now, it offers a snapshot of how people in the early 1900s understood invention and progress.
Because so little verified personal detail is readily available, Severing is remembered mainly through this surviving work rather than through a well-documented public life. That makes his writing especially interesting: it preserves the sense of wonder that surrounded science at the start of the 20th century.