Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us -- an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In bestselling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time...

The biography of Jeanne Villepreux-Power whose curiosity about undersea life led her to pioneer the use of glass tanks for research.

From the bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, this is the incredible true story of how a college student and two female accomplices stole some of the rarest objects on the planet—moon rocks—from an "impregnable" high-tech vault. 
But breaking into a highly secure laboratory wasn't easy. Thad Roberts, an intern in a prestigious NASA training

...

Historian and biographer James Srodes tells Benjamin Franklin's incredible life story, making full use of the previously neglected Franklin papers to provide the most riveting account yet of the journalist, scientist, politician, and unlikely adventurer. From London, Paris, Philadelphia to his numerous romantic liaisons, Franklin's life becomes a panorama of dramatic history.

" What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? Beginning with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s, Walter Isaacson explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity,...

Why did Benjamin Franklin retire from business and become gentleman? Why did he admire the British Empire - and join the American Revolution? Why did he begin writing his Autobiography when he did? And how did the "first American" become an American in the first place? Renowned historian Gordon S. Wood spent ten years studying a legend. In this untraditional biography, he penetrates beneath 200 years' accumulation of images and representations to...

A collection of artworks inspired by the lives and achievements of fifty famous women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, from the ancient world to the present, profiles each notable individual.

This is the extraordinary true story of America's first female rocket scientist. Told by her son, it describes Mary Sherman Morgan's crucial contribution to launching America's first satellite and the author's labyrinthine journey to uncover his mother's lost legacy, one buried deep under a lifetime of secrets political, technological, and personal. In 1938, a young German rocket enthusiast named Wernher von Braun had dreams of building a rocket...

To be alive today is to be confronted by the products of science - from aspirin, refrigeration, electric light and the telephone, to the airplane and the computer - to name just a few. In addition to beneficial medicines and life enhancing discoveries, however, scientific research also has led to many dangerous developments, such as the machine ...