History's Great Inventors (History's Highlights)

by N/A

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.45

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $4.60

  History's great inventors are looked at irreverently in this book, which considers the more spectacular events and people through history. Each double-page spread takes one particular person or event, and relates the story with historical background and actual evidence. Archimedes is said to have invented many weapons for the Greek armies but is best known for the Archimedes screw which was used to bail water out of flooded ships. The story goes that Archimedes also worked out a scientific principle while lying in the bath and shouted Eureka (the solution). Leonardo da Vinci was an all-rounder. He was a painter, a sculptor, an architect, musician, engineer, a scientist as well as one of history's greatest inventors. John Gutenberg invented the first successful system of moveable type. A lawyer Fust, who had loaned Gutenberg money, saw the money-making opportunities the invention had to offer so took Gutenberg to court when he could not repay the money. Gutenberg died penniless. Alexander Bell used his knowledge of the human ear to invent a machine that could carry human speech along a wire and in 1875, the world's first telephone call was made. He also set up a laboratory that produced the first phonographic record. Charles Babbage, spotted mistakes in the published logarithm tables and built a machine which he hoped would calculate logarithms automatically. He worked on it for 37 years but the technology he needed for the machine to work properly had not been developed. He died frustrated, his dream unrealized. Mary Phelps Jacob designed the first brassiere, which made it possible for women to wear practical clothes instead of long constricting dresses. James Martin invented the ejection seat, which soon very quickly becaome a standard feature of jet fighters and other planes since the 1950s. Marie Curie invented radiotherapy which has been used to kill some cancerous tumours. The book expands the theme of invention with tales of remarkable people including Werner von Braun, Maria the Jewess, Thomas Edison, Galileo Galilei, George Stephenson, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Frank Whittle and Gottlieb Daimler.