Edison's Concrete Piano: Flying Tanks, Six-Nippled Sheep, Walk-on-Water Shoes, and 12 Other Flops from Great Inventors

(Paperback)

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Description

Highlights the careers of famous inventors, revealing the lesser-known and most fascinating facts about their careers, their wackier hobbies, big flops and great successes. Thomas Edison, for example, created a concrete piano and a machine to speak to the dead. Written snapshots of inventors through the ages are accompanied by photographs of their lives and inventions. From Alexander Graham Bell's multi-nippled sheep to Leonardo da Vinci's walk-on-water shoes, these ludicrous ideas and faulty designs will leave readers with a smile on their faces.

Reviews

"[Wearing's] background as a science educator is advantageous in this entertaining piece of popular science: she portrays lively personalities and eccentric projects in concrete prose." -- Booklist
"Captivating ... This book is full of lessons for inventors and non-inventors alike." -- Henry Petroski, author of Success through Failure
"The popular science is fun and easily accessible, and there's more to the inventors experiments than the title can contain." -- Los Angeles Times
"This book sparkles with heaps of ideas, some plain bonkers, others, like the car, more pedestrian....this book is fun and full of quirks...a fine yarn." -- The Waikato Times

Author Bio

Judy Wearing is an award-winning educator, author, and science education consultant, who holds a PhD in biology from Oxford University. She lives in Newburgh, Ontario.