From Wheaties to telephones, microwave ovens to yo-yos, here are the inspiring and often funny stories of 50 mistakes and misunderstandings that helped bring about life as we know it. With hilarious cartoons and wacky facts, this fascinating compendium illustrates the adage "If you don't learn from your mistakes, there's no sense making them."
Nature does it best … and did it first! Explore the ways we have looked to nature for brilliant new designs and innovations to solve our own conundrums. Each example in nature is paired with a fun, rhyming description, an example of how it has been used by us, and a question to the reader―"what other problems can be solved?"
Super-smart Julian Calendar thinks starting junior high at a new school will mean he can shed his nerdy image-but then he meets Ben and Greta, two secret scientists like himself! The three form a secret club, complete with a high-tech lair. There, they can work to their hearts content on projects like the Stink-O-Meter, the Kablovsky Copter, and the Nightsneak Goggles. All that tinkering comes in handy when the trio discovers an evil scientist's dastardly plan to rob a museum. Can three inventors, armed with their wacky creations, hope to defeat this criminal mastermind?
Ben Franklin was the most famous American in the entire world during colonial times. No wonder! After all, the man could do just about anything. Why, he was an author and an athlete and a patriot and a scientist and an inventor to boot. He even found a way to steal the lightning right out of the sky.
This book follows the day of a little boy, demonstrating with each page, how Black inventors have greatly enriched our nation's landscape.
We depend on electricity in almost everything that we do. It gives us heat, light, transportation and entertainment. Electricity has always existed, but it is only in the last 200 years or so that we have learned how to make use of it. Find out what electricity does for us – and how we managed without it in the past.
Frank William Epperson is a curious boy who wants to be an inventor when he grows up. Since inventing begins with experimenting, Frank spends a lot of time in his “laboratory” (i.e. his back porch) trying out his ideas, such as building a double-handled handcar that whizzes past the single-handled cars in his neighborhood. What Frank loves most, though, is experimenting with liquids. When he invents his own yummy flavored soda water drink, his friends love it!
IT'S 1876 AND THE whole country is celebrating the 100th birthday of the United States. The biggest party is in Philadelphia at the World's Fair, where the latest and greatest inventions are on display for all to see. Alexander Graham Bell is headed to the fair to demonstrate his invention - a talking machine he calls the telephone. But will anyone come to see him at the world's most important science fair? And more importantly, will his machine work?
‘The Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903. When I was growing up, their success seemed like the end of the story. But what I've learned from a lifetime of living and working around planes is that the Wright Flyer was just a beginning. Being the first to make something doesn't always mean your solution is the best one. Engineers spend as much time improving existing designs as creating new ones.' The Wright brothers’ airplane was an amazing achievement. But imagine if pilots today still Lay on their stomachs and slid their hips back and forth to help control the plane like the Wrights did!
Like most of us, Frances Gabe detested housework -- she found cleaning a "nerve-twangling bore". Unlike most of us, she invented a contraption to free herself from this tedious task forever: a self-cleaning house!
