Inventors: Incredible Stories of the World's Most Ingenious Inventions

"I didn’t know it was four times! There were numerous books on role models; what I loved about this one was that although there are kids’ books about inventions, there aren’t many about inventors. Most books about role models are about scientists. We all liked this one because it was a little bit different in flavour. It also just spans such a wide range of types of inventions and types of inventors over time and over different cultures that, again, it provides diverse role models implicitly rather than explicitly. Yes, they could be a 13 year old Maasai in Kenya. I was particularly taken with it when I got to the Lizzie Magie story. Shortly before I read this book, I’d read a much longer article on her, which was the first I knew about this woman who was incredible. She was a feminist. She was interested in economics, which is why she developed what she called The Landlord’s Game. She invented all sorts of other things. She actually had patents on them. Then the Monopoly game base was stolen from her without any credit. I’ve been fascinated by the story and then I got to Inventors and found that Lizzie Magie is in it! I read an amazing book several years ago, it’s called Fortune Is a River , about da Vinci. He was working also for military purposes. At that time, Florence was battling with Pisa. He was working for Machiavelli who had decided that one way to lay siege to Pisa would be to divert the Arno River out to the sea before it got to Pisa. Da Vinci actually knew enough hydrology that he constructed a workable plan to do that, it’s just that the people trying to carry out the plan didn’t follow the directions. Well, not just children. Here at Bristol, I have several friends who are artists. In fact, we have a programme in our department that we call EarthArt . We try to bring a couple of artists in every year and connect them with scientists who they want to interact with. We also have a small gallery where they exhibit their work. It’s a very low budget thing, but the artists are very eager to talk to scientists. And what I’ve noticed is when the scientists start working with artists, the scientists recognise that the artists provide a different perspective. So it’s a good cross-fertilisation. So I would say definitely, yes, that there’s really a growing appreciation for cross-disciplinary approaches. Personally, I’m a very visual person and I’ve found that I can communicate very well with artists because in art there’s a lot of experimentation, there is a lot of problem solving. Artists have an idea of what they want to do, but a lot of it is very technical. So I see a lot of similarities between art and science."

"Inventors: Incredible Stories of the World’s Most Ingenious Inventions written by multi-award winning scientist Lord Robert Winston, was shortlisted for the 2021 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize . It is a richly illustrated book with dozens of stories of inspiring inventors, from Archimedes to contemporary ones such as Deepika Kurup, who in 2012 — at the age of 14 — won a science competition with a cheap solar-powered water purifier."