I suspect that, like me, you believe the non-stick frying pan was one of the spin-offs from the space race. Au contraire. As you will discover from this book, Teflon was discovered by accident in 1938, and its first use was as a sealant in plutonium production plants, then as a coating for artillery shell nose-cones and a lining for liquid fuel storage tanks. It was patented in 1941 and given its trademark name in 1945, before the end of the war. It was first used for frying pans in 1954, three years before Sputnik was launched. True, various space missions have been responsible for many inventions we consider domestic  the Super Soaker squirt gun was created at the Jet Propulsion lab in California  but the ultimate progenitor was the military.

Nowak's book is full of such interesting snippets. The clever thing is that he has managed to trace an enormous range of our technological innovations back to three main impulses: to fight, to eat, and to . . . er, satisfy our sexual instincts. His inspiration, he candidly acknowledges, was Paris Hilton's celebrated 2004 sex tape. Where, he wondered, had he seen that green hue before? (Apparently, there is a green tinge to the picture.) From, he remembered eventually, the night-vision images from Operation Desert Storm, or the first Gulf war.

Now although in this case the one predates the other by some 13 years, it is not news to some people that lust has long driven technology. Certainly the process can become quite entangled. The Barbie doll, for instance, evolved from a joke mini-mannequin based on a suggestive German cartoon character called Lilli. Jack Ryan, an engineer, used his experience of designing miniaturised moving parts for missile systems during the second world war to design the doll's joints. ("The levels of stress that adolescent girls could place on their toys weren't unlike the forces of gravity, velocity and drag that missiles had to deal with," Nowak illuminatingly points out.)

Meanwhile, the need to feed people as efficiently and cheaply as possible during wartime was a major driver of technology (the tin can, dating from the Napoleonic wars, being the archetypal example), and here we learn about the streamlining of various food preparation and serving processes, with regard to the fast food industry in general and McDonald's in particular. Whether Nowak brings this part of his book into line with the rest of it is not something I'm convinced of, but it's interesting enough.

Being a self-confessed geek, Nowak can at times have an ethical compass that might seem a little wonky: he fails to air the (scientific) arguments against GM foods (and one cringes to read Prince Charles, his main source of anti-GM remarks, on the subject), and no one who saw the pictures of the Highway of Death would have considered the first Gulf war to be "slick" and "painless". But these are not, in context, significant lapses, and his geekiness is infectious, as when he tracks down Lena Sjööblom, the Playboy playmate whose centrefold picture (from November 1972) was one of the first used to test digital imaging (another nice fit between pornography and technology). You will also learn that jpeg stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which may one day help you in a pub quiz. And you will find yourself considerably better informed about Tupperware and clingfilm (the latter having been one of those things that helped us win the second world war).

This is a breezy, accessible book. I would have preferred something a little more pretentious, with some continental intellectual flashiness thrown in (I'd also have liked an index; the absence of one is almost insulting). But then that is just me; and the connections Nowak makes may well form the basis for the kind of thing I'm hankering after. And his conclusions are indeed thought-provoking. You can think of it, if you wish, as a modern version of Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, which proposed that society's vices are actually good for overall economic health.