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

Wearing, Judy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550228633 ISBN 13: 9781550228632

Publisher: ECW Press, 2009

Synopsis

Edison’s Concrete Piano highlights the careers of famous inventors revealing the lesser-known and most fascinating facts about their careers, their wackier hobbies, and especially their big flops and great successes. Take Thomas Edison for example, who revolutionized our world with the light bulb, the phonograph, and the forerunner to the movie camera. He also created a concrete piano, a non-operational helicopter made from box kites and piano wire, and a machine to speak to the dead. Edison was not the only one to engineer a complete flop now and again; in fact, failure amid greatness is the norm not the exception. Did you know that Henry Ford followed his Model T success with a tractor that was famous for killing its customers? Ever heard of a flying tank? Can you imagine why physics genius Albert Einstein created a refrigerator that howled like a banshee? Or what Nikola Tesla was thinking when he tested his earthquake machine in crowded Manhattan? And how did Alexander Graham Bell, after inventing the phone, pass the time on his sheep farm in Nova Scotia? From whole scale improvements, like the assembly line, to those toilet bowl caps, Edison’s Concrete Piano covers it all. Written snapshots of inventors through the ages to the current day are accompanied by photographs and illustrations of their lives and their inventions. Read about Edison, Tesla, DaVinci, Pupin, and Alexander Graham Bell, alongside the inventors you’ve never considered the people who are dreaming up many of the products you’ll use every day. 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 you with a smile on your face, and the reminder that even the very best of us make mistakes.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

From Booklist:

Wearing details 16 inventions that never took off and lists the personality traits that typify the inventive mind. They include determination, rebelliousness, financial unrealism, and thinking in redemptive terms, such as the salvation of humanity. Okay, so the Popcorn Volcano flopped and, therefore, didn’t transform civilization, but visions of improving daily life spurred on inventors such as Buckminster Fuller, George Washington Carver, and Henry Ford. Likewise, thinking big fired the mind of Stanley Mason, inventor of the dental floss dispenser, into a scheme to solve the energy crisis. If inventors still tinker with that problem, they also continue to dream up ideas for automobiles, watercraft, aircraft, toys, and medical devices, all of which were arenas of ultimately failed endeavors for Wearing’s creatively obsessive subjects. Her background as a science educator is advantageous in this entertaining piece of popular science: she portrays lively personalities and eccentric projects in concrete prose. Speaking of which, opinions on the concrete piano varied: a builder (not Steinway) praised its “exceptionally pure, full tone”; an owner compared its sound to that of a “terrible spinet.” --Gilbert Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1550228633
• ISBN 13: 9781550228632
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272