Great Inventors and their Inventions

This is a marvellous snapshot of nine of the world’s greatest inventors: Archimedes, Gutenberg, Franklin, Nobel, Bell, Marconi, the Wright brothers and Edison. Where would modern mass communication and transport be without such pioneers as Gutenberg, whose engraving tool, cutting into steel, could produce letters no more than a 10th of a millimetre thick, which could actually achieve a higher resolution than letters printed today with a laser printer? That’s the sort of information I, and most kids I’m sure, lap up. David Angus judges perfectly when to switch from the highly technical to the anecdotal. One minute you’re scratching your head at exactly how Archimedes, with a piece of string and two sticks, worked out that the area of a circle is always the same as the area of a triangle when one of the triangle’s sides is equivalent in length to the circle’s radius and another to its circumference. And then, mercifully, we’re transported to 18th-century Pennsylvania, where Benjamin Franklin is flying a kite in a thunderstorm to see if the lightning will travel down the string to the metal key he is holding. He won’t get a shock: he is holding the key with a silk ribbon that he is desperately trying to keep dry. A fascinating and, with luck, inspiring audio.

Sue Arnold, The Guardian