The Picture History of Great Inventors

This book is a great introduction to inventors for my 5-year-old. It has great illustrations that he enjoys. Also, the text is not too complex for a 5-year-old.For an older child, you would probably want something with more detailed text.

Great resource book for the history of science. My 4th and 6th graders love it.

This is a fantastic book. I have the softcover edition. We got this because we were talking about Thomas Edison and reading the Edison Childhoods of Famous Americans book. This is an excellent tie-in, and so much more. The pages are high-quality paper, and each inventor gets a page (some get a two-page spread). You get historical context for the time period the inventor was living -- there is an illustrated timeline at the bottom of the pages. Then you get a large section of text and many, many illustrations of the inventions and ideas of the inventors. The detail is excellent, and the information on each inventor is very rich. There are all the inventors I would expect, and plenty of people whose inventions are great but whom I had never studied. So new information, TONS of information, and fun facts and trivia. This is truly a dynamite book. The book is chronological and it includes a table of contents, an 8-page illustrated glossary at the back, an index, and three synopsis pages -- one each for the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. The seventies page shows the floppy disk, microchip, the Sony Walkman, the compact disk, the maglev train, MIT and Apple and personal computing, LCDs, space innovations, fiber optic cables, pocket calculators, VCRs, bar codes, the Sears Tower, and historical context. It's amazing. Its style reminds me of some of Lynne Cheney's books -- the excellence of the illustrations and all the information packed on the pages. Each page is like an illustrated biography, with so much information packed in and made clear. I really can't praise it highly enough. It took us over an hour to absorb the page on Thomas Edison. We just kept learning more and more.