This is a story of a young boy who starts from plowing fields in the early 1900’s to creating one of the world’s most popular inventions: the television. Philo Farnsworth was truly a self-taught young man. Through hard work and trial and error experiments throughout his life until he finally got ...
At my local library, this book was not shelved with the biographies. Hmm - I wonder why?I grew up in Illinois and my grandmother collected all things Lincoln. I have visited the Lincoln museum in Springfield and I have toured New Salem so I came to this book with a solid background. Neverthele...
An amusing romp into the history of hair. Brief, unusual facts that leave you wanting to find out more. One notable fact for me: 450 tons of hair are exported from India; much of it landing in Hollywood. And where does this Hollywood hair come from? Why, from pilgrims in temples of course.... hmm...
For thirty years, the whole last half of his life, Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with unlocking the secrets of nature. His notebooks are the mind-boggling evidence of a fifteenth-century scientist standing at the edge of the modern world, basing his ideas on observation and experimentation. Scru...
Before Freud, nobody discussed unconscious motives, Oedipal complexes, the id and the ego, or Freudian slips. Freud was a complicated, often irascible man, who in 19th-century Vienna developed his still-controversial ideas and the new discipline of psychoanalysis.
Had he been brooding on his theory for twenty years, only to see his life’s work upstaged by someone else? Yet, always a gentleman, he wanted to do the right thing—give Wallace priority, the important acknowledgment in science that gives someone credit as being the first to make a discovery. Now ...
—Isaac Newton, 1675 THE BRAIN HAS NOT always gotten respect. When turning a corpse into a mummy, the ancient Egyptians used a small hook to scrape brain matter out through the nostrils. Then they threw it away. After all, the brain did so little—everyone knew that intelligence and emotions arose...
Marie wrote about the family’s Easter vacation in April 1906. Everyone frolicked in the countryside, enjoying the signs of spring, both parents watching their girls chasing butterflies, Pierre picking bouquets of marigolds for Marie.But she was not pleased when he returned to Paris early to do so...
Today they are among the most precious things on the planet. The notebooks, the core obsession of Leonardo’s life, are what place him among the giants of science, not specific discoveries he made or new inventions he created.So what are they, exactly?We call them “notebooks,” but they are not bou...