Look backwards, look forward: Marconi's first wireless test resembled UWB more than the frequency-huddled technology that was commercialized. Tom Standage, an editor at The Economist, specializes in this kind of Janus writing, in which the developments of the present are recontextualized in terms of their origins (sometimes lost) in the past. Likewise, he rehabilitates the past, by showing that historical technological innovation isn't all people huddled over a corpse, prodding organs.
Standage is one of my favorite writers and has a book coming out this year that will expand on this theme from the standpoint of beverages instead of technology with A History of the World in Six Glasses.