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

By Judy Wearing

Highlighting the careers of well-known inventors, this exploration of failure amid greatness reveals the lesser-known and most fascinating facts about their careers, their wackier hobbies, and their big flops alongside great successes. Thomas Edison, for example, not only revolutionized the world with the light bulb but also designed a concrete piano, a nonoperational helicopter made from box kites and piano wire, and a machine to speak to the dead. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, actually devoted most of his time to his sheep farm in Nova Scotia?devising a multinippled sheep somewhere along the way. The ludicrous ideas and faulty designs housed in this volume will inspire laughs and serve as a reminder that even the very best minds make mistakes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2009
• ISBN: 9781554905515

Reviews for Edison's Concrete Piano

[Seth Klibonoff · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Uneven and poorly written. The individual chapters even seem to be written as if they were by different authors.