Adam Hart-Davis – författare

Full of incredible tales of achievement and ingenuity, Engineers celebrates the greatest engineers that ever lived and the stamp they have left on our world. Learn all about how engineering projects have changed the course of history and added to human progress, from those who built the Great Pyramid in Egypt to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Discover the impressive structures of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the first forays into space travel, and the pioneering computer scientists of today.From initial concepts to prototypes and finished designs, Engineers is full to bursting with technical drawings, specially commissioned artworks, blueprints and virtual tours that help bring engineering's greatest structures, inventions and technological breakthroughs to life.

talking SCIENCE TV personality Adam Hart-Davis meets 14 of the world’s leading scientists to discuss their work, their passions, and those elusive ground-breaking moments in their lives. This is a book that shows how science can explain the world that we inherited and shape the world that we would like to leave for future generations. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Bath, UK) tells her personal story of the discovery of the first pulsar. Sir Michael Berry (Bristol, UK) ties knots in nothing.Richard Dawkins (Oxford, UK) explains what Darwinism means today.Loren Graham (MIT, US) explains why Stalin’s top-down policy meant that no Russian engineering project would ever work properly.Richard Gregory (Bristol, UK) explores some of the visual illusions that so easily fool us.Eric Lander (MIT, US) discusses the excitement of the human genome project.Lord May of Oxford (UK) President of the Royal Society talks about chaos, ecology and HIV.John Maynard Smith (Sussex, UK) discusses why we bother with sex.Rosalind Picard (MIT, US) believes in wearable computers that understand our emotions.Sir Martin Rees (Cambridge, UK), Astronomer Royal, discusses the big bang, black holes and the end of the universe.Eugenie Scott (Oakland, US) is a leading campaigner for the teaching in schools of evolution rather than creationism.Lewis Wolpert (UCL, UK) speaks on the ethics and practicality of cloning and on his own depression.Colleen Cavanaugh (Harvard, US) describes the excitement and discomfort of exploring the deep ocean.Peter Raven (St Louis, US) is a leading advocate of biodiversity – described by Time magazine as a hero for the planet.

Adam Hart-Davis vividly recreates the story of the Eddystone Lighthouse, the character of the man who built it, and the power of the elements that finally destroyed them both.

Adam Hart-Davis offers a fascinating insight into some of the titans of British history; the nineteenth century engineers who transformed the country and the world through their drive, determination and innovative thinking. These are the men who powered the Industrial Revolution and laid the foundations for the technology of the modern world.

‘I have been ill and frightfully bored and the one thing I have wanted is a big album of your absurd beautiful drawings to turn over. You give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world.’ – H. G. Wells to W. Heath Robinson (1914)This book takes a nostalgic look back to the imaginative and often frivolous world of William Heath Robinson, one of the few artists to have given his name to the English language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression Heath Robinson is used to describe ‘any absurdly ingenious and impracticable device of the kind illustrated by this artist’. Yet his elaborate drawings of contraptions are not the only thing to make this book very Heath Robinson. Full of quirky images from Romans wearing polka dots to balding men seducing mermaids, Very Heath Robinson presents an unconventional history of the world in which technology and its social setting get equal billing.