Customer Reviews

Great Inventions Through History (Chambers Compact Reference Series)

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As an engineer, I was looking forward to reading this book. Unfortunately, the writing tends to be a little dry.

This book is basically a number of short articles, one to two pages in length, on a large number of inventions. It covers agricultural, mechanical, chemical, and a number of other inventions or discoveries. It gives a brief history of each invention, and then describes the invention.

Often, however, the descriptions are crying for a good illustration. And while there are illustrations scattered throughout the book, there just aren't enough.

This book is intended to give the reader a taste of where so many things we take for granted came from. Organizing the inventions down by sphere (agriculture and food, energy and mechanics, etc.), each invention is listed with who invented it (if known), where and when. Then a paragraph or more is included that discusses the invention.

Overall, this is not a book to be taken too seriously. I can't see what, if any, criteria was used to determine what was included and what wasn't. Also, the text is often too short to provide more than the most basic of introduction to the invention.

That said, though, this is a fun book, with absolutely tons of information in it. I would classify this as a trivia book, and perhaps a good "bathroom" book, that is one with very short, simple sections.