Now with an Historical Afterword by Ron MillerIncludes the original illustrationsFeatured in Ron Miller’s “The Conquest of Space Book Series.” Originally published in 1751, this fantasy-adventure contains one of the most detailed and best-realized spacecraft/flying machines in science fiction. It marked the transition from the fantastic and mystical means of reaching space that had preceded it and laid the foundation for the scientific verisimilitude of Poe a...

Just three women qualified for a professorship in physics in Germany before the Second World War. All three began their careers with great promise; all three had to leave Hitlers Germany, among them Hertha Sponer. An ambitious girl, she had to struggle to achieve the education she craved, culminating in a Ph.D. at the University of Gttingen. There followed an apprenticeship in Berlin, and work under the aegis of James Franck, around the time he received the Nobel Prize. Their academic worl...

Brought to you by Penguin.This is the first major biography for a generation of a truly formidable king. Edward I is familiar to millions as 'Longshanks', conqueror of Scotland and nemesis of Sir William Wallace ('Braveheart'). Edward was born to rule England, but believed that it was his right to rule all of Britain. His reign was one of the most dramatic of the entire Middle Ages, leading to war and conquest on an unprecedented scale, and leaving a legacy of divi...

A series of biographical lectures originally published in 1850. Each chapter is a philosophical treatment of the life of an intellectual. The six representatives are Plato, Swedenborg, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Napolean and Goethe.

Johns Hopkins University, one of the preeminent medical schools in the nation today, has played a unique role in the history of medicine. When it first opened its doors in 1893, medicine was a rough-and-ready trade. It would soon evolve into a rigorous science. It was nothing short of a revolution.This transition might seem inevitable from our vantage point today. In recent years, medical science has mapped the human genome, deployed robotic tools to perform delicate surgeries, and...

A companion series to the acclaimed Word Biblical Commentary.Finding the great themes of the books of the Bible is essential to the study of God's Word and to the preaching and teaching of its truths. These themes and ideas are often like precious gems: they lie beneath the surface and can only be discovered with some difficulty. While commentaries are useful for helping readers understand the content of a verse or chapter, they are not usually designed to help the...

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean thi...

A timeless classic that combines imaginative adventure with sharp social commentary. Lemuel Gulliver journeys to strange and fascinating lands filled with unusual societies and unexpected discoveries. Each voyage reveals new perspectives on politics, human behavior, and the absurdities of society. Both entertaining and thought-provoking, the novel blends fantasy, humor, and satire in a truly unforgettable way. Written by Jonathan Swift. Travel beyond imagination and uncover a world of sati...

Well-known names such as Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Edward Teller are usually those that surround the creation of the atom bomb. One name that is rarely mentioned is Leo Szilard, known in scientific circles as “father of the atom bomb.” The man who first developed the idea of harnessing energy from nuclear chain reactions, he is curiously buried with barely a trace in the history of this well-known and controversial topic.Born in Hungary and educated ...

Lord Byron's satirical poem 'Don Juan' is based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womaniser but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an Epic Satire. Byron completed 16 cantos, leaving an unfinished 17th canto before his death in 1824. Byron claimed he had no ideas in his mind as to what would happen in subsequent cantos as he wrote his work.

In 1809, New Yorkers were buzzing about a series of classified ads concerning the whereabouts of Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. They were unaware that Washington Irving had invented the man entirely and placed the ads himself. Knickerbocker's purported manuscript, A History of New York, was Irving's own. Told from Knickerbocker's point of view, A History of New York is a chronicle of New York's fifty years under Dutch rule in the 1600s that plays fast and loose with the facts, to ...