This is a marvellous snapshot of nine of the worldu2019s 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? Thatu2019s the sort of information I, and most kids Iu2019m sure, lap up. David Angus judges perfectly when to switch from the highly technical to the anecdotal. One minute youu2019re 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 triangleu2019s sides is equivalent in length to the circleu2019s radius and another to its circumference. And then, mercifully, weu2019re 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 wonu2019t 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.