Genius: Great Inventors and their Creations

By Jack Challoner

Publication date: October 2010

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Genius: Great Inventors and Their Creations, gives readers an unprecedented insight into the minds and lives of some of the great men and women who have helped shape the modern world.

The book transports the reader back in time to share the excitement and inspiration of some of the most important moments in the history of technology. As an invention is rarely the brainchild of a single person, however brilliant, the book also includes timelines that explain the development of an invention and pay homage to some of the other great inventors that came before and after.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book contains 20 rare and removable facsimile documents including:

• Pages from Michael Faraday’s laboratory notebook describing the world’s first electric motor.
• Extracts from Alexander Graham Bell’s notebook from March 1876, describing some of his attempts that led to the first successful transmission of human speech through wires and the invention of the telephone.
• The first page of Tim Berners-Lee’s historic proposal for the World Wide Web, marked “vague but exciting” by his boss.

Jack Challoner studied physics at Imperial College and worked at the Science Museum before becoming a science writer in 1991. He has written more than 30 books on a variety of scientific and technological subjects. He has also written for encyclopaedias, magazines, museum exhibitions and websites, and acts as scientific consultant for books, CD-roms, plays and television programmes.