It Looked Good on Paper: Bizarre Inventions, Design Disasters, and Engineering Follies

This book's 350 pages contain 67 individual stories. The authorship of these stories is shared among 12 individuals. As can be expected in a book like this, some stories are more interesting than others, depending on the reader's preferences for either the subject matter or a given author's writing style. Nevertheless, all of these stories have varying degrees of tongue-in-cheek-ness, which makes for very pleasant light reading. The writing style is generally quite engaging, often humorous and accessible to a wide readership. In a book with such a wide-ranging scope, errors may creep in which, depending on the reader's knowledge base, may be easily missed. For me, two errors stand out. They are both in the chapter entitled "Overcooking with Atoms". On page 47 can be found the statement: "sodium reactors never deplete their fuel supply, so the SRE could ... provide uninterrupted power without any need for additional uranium". This statement is misleading since it implies that the sodium reactor is a perpetual motion machine, i.e., it will run forever without any new fuel - like an automobile that will run forever on a single gas tank. This is obviously wrong; better wording should have been chosen. The other error pertains to the use of an incorrect term: on page 49, the term "radio nucleotides" is used when the correct term is "radionuclides". Aside from these minor quibbles, this is a book that can be enjoyed by absolutely anyone.