About the Author:
Judy Wearing is an award-winning educator and author with a PhD in biology from Oxford University. She works as a science education consultant and develops activities and books for children. This is her first popular science book. 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
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