In over 200 delightful short essays Bill captures the creativity andimpact of engineers. He talks of their spectacular achievements -jets, satellites, skyscrapers, and fiber optics - but draws hisdeepest insights from the everyday, the quotidian. He finds beauty,elegance and meaning in Ferris wheels, Tupperware, Slinkys, moodrings, waterless urinals and Velcro. Delivered originally on publicradio between 1999 and 2006, each essay is a small slice of the worldcreated by engineers. The essay...

Discover the secret method used to build the world…For millennia, humans have used one simple method to solve problems. Whether it's planting crops, building skyscrapers, developing photographs, or designing the first microchip, all creators follow the same steps to engineer progress. But this powerful method, the "engineering method", is an all but hidden process that few of us have heard of—let alone understand—but that influences every aspect of our lives.

Eight Amazing Engineering Stories reveals the stories behind how engineers use specific elements to create the material world around us. In eight chapters, the EngineerGuy team exposes the magnificence of the innovation and engineering of digital camera imagers, tiny accelerometers, atomic clocks, enriched uranium, batteries, microwave ovens, lasers, and anodized metals. In addition, short primers cover the scientific principles underlying the engineering, including waves, nuclear structure, ...

Fatal Flight brings vividly to life the year of operation of R.101, the last great British airship -- a luxury liner three and a half times the length of a 747 jet, with a spacious lounge, a dining room that seated fifty, glass-walled promenade decks, and a smoking room. The British expected R.101 to spearhead a fleet of imperial airships that would dominate the skies as British naval ships, a century earlier, had ruled the seas. The dream ended when, on its demonstration flight t...

This book introduces modern readers to Michael Faraday’s great nineteenth-century lectures on The Chemical History of a Candle. This edition is a companion book to the popular EngineerGuy YouTube series of the lectures. This books contains supplemental material to help readers appreciate Faraday’s key insight that “there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of science than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.” Through a careful examination of a burning c...

Discover the secret method used to build the world . . .For millennia, humans have used one simple method to solve problems. Whether it's planting crops, building skyscrapers, developing photographs, or designing the first microchip, all creators follow the same steps to engineer progress. But this powerful method, the "engineering method", is an all but hidden process that few of us have heard of—let alone understand—but that influences every aspect of our lives.

A special 10th anniversary edition of the million-copy bestseller What If? from the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd—revised and annotated with brand-new illustrations and answers to the most absurd hypothetical questions you never thought to ask.Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and li...

International bestselling authors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's fascinating, entertaining, and clear introduction to quantum mechanicsIn The Quantum Universe, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw approach the world of quantum mechanics in the same way they did in Why Does E=mc2? and make fundamental scientific principles accessible-and fascinating-to everyone.The subatomic realm has a reputation for weirdness, spawning any number of profound misunderstanding...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • MORE THAN 3 MILLION COPIES SOLD • This instant classic explores how we can change our lives by changing our habits.“Few [books] become essential manuals for business and living. The Power of Habit is an exception.”—Financial TimesA WALL STREET JOURNAL AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIn The Power of Habit, award-winning busines...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A whirlwind tour of fundamental physics and cosmology.”—The Wall Street Journal“Fascinating . . . a wealth of ideas [that] leave us with a clearer understanding of modern physics in all its invigorating complexity.”—Los Angeles TimesWhen and how did the universe begin? Why are we here? What is the nature of reality? Is the apparent “grand design” of our universe evidence of a benevo...

In one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchhiker series.Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, soon to be a Hulu original series!The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read)Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galac...

A Fully-Updated, No-Nonsense Guide to ElectronicsAdvance your electronics knowledge and gain the skills necessary to develop and construct your own functioning gadgets. Written by a pair of experienced engineers and dedicated hobbyists, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition, lays out the essentials and provides step-by-step instructions, schematics, and illustrations. Discover how to select the right components, design and build circuits, use...