Inventions and Inventors

Imaginative Jack is ready to build the house of his dreams, complete with a racetrack, flying room, and gigantic slide. Jack's limitless creativity and infectious enthusiasm will inspire budding young inventors to imagine their own fantastical designs.

A girl decides to make something magnificent with the help of her assistant — her dog, but they "are shocked to discover that the thing isn't magnificent. Or good. It isn't even kind-of-sort-of okay. It is all wrong. The girl tosses it aside and gives it another go." From her efforts, children see the importance of planning, gathering supplies, building, and not giving up when a good idea doesn't initially work out.

Move over Tom Edison! This intriguing look at Tesla’s importance in early use of electricity is well documented and handsomely illustrated first look at an important scientist and inventor.

Love it or hate it, everyone seems to have an opinion about glitter. But how much do you know about the tiny, shiny confetti? What makes glitter glitter? Why does it stick to everything? Who invented it? How is it made? Is glitter bad for the environment? With informative text and vibrant art, Glitter Everywhere covers the good, the bad, and shiny of all things glitter.

The voice of an old, blind Galileo Galilei is used to look back on a life that started in Pisa where early on he challenged tradition. Though confined, the elderly Galileo asserts that, "The truth has a way of escaping into the light." Bold lines border illustrations to evoke time and place, enhanced by spot illustrations of Galileo's work and observations.

Lewis Latimer's invention of the carbon filament made light bulbs more affordable and longer lasting. Readers follow his journey from working with Alexander Graham Bell to improving Thomas Edison's light bulb. It's an enlightening story filled with engaging text and colorful images, all reviewed by Smithsonian experts.

A romp through the possibilities of the unbound imagination. Marveltown is a place where flights of fancy come to life. Residents go sky-skiing for fun, drive around on a skyway held up by ion rays, and work in the Invent-o-Drome to come up with ever more fantastical and farfetched creations. Even the kids get in on the fun, inventing homework-eating mechanical dogs, Hypno-Goggles, and the Rocket Chair, which can launch a kid from home to school in seconds flat. When giant worker robots go nuts and run amok, it is the kids’ inventions that save Marveltown.

Nature does it best…and did it first! Explore the ways we have looked to nature for brilliant new designs and innovations to solve our own conundrums. Each example in nature is paired with a fun, rhyming description, an example of how it has been used by us, and a question to the reader―“what other problems can be solved?”

A fictional account based on events in the life of eccentric inventor Lodner Phillips as told from the perspective of his daughter, Virena. Papa theorizes and tinkers but never succeeds. Finally, while the family is dropping lines from a pier into Lake Michigan, his daughter asks, "have you ever wondered what it's like to be a fish?" Immediately the man dashes back to his workshop and soon produces one of the world's earliest submarines, the Whitefish. Children will delight in the way Virena is the catalyst for her father's successive improvements to his primitive vessel as she continues...

Each room of every house holds items, objects, and other surprises that were invented at one time or another. (A kitchen calendar, for example, comes from a 16th century. Detailed, interactive pages are filled with fascinating tidbits sure to intrigue and inspire.

Strong lines and narrative combine in this picture book biography of the Vermonter who figured out how to photograph real snowflakes. The dramatic drawings won illustrator Mary Azarian a Caldecott Medal.

Born in England in the early 19th century, Anna was encouraged by her father to observe, study, and document the natural world. Together, they also experimented with light as a way to photograph and record her botanic specimens. Unfortunately, none of the photographs exist today as the “prints faded over time, like memories.” Later she created books using cyanotype (known today as sun prints). Lush but muted illustrations in blues and white evoke the period and this scientist’s work. Additional resources are included.

Two machines captivated young Philo Farnsworth: a telephone and a phonograph. Both had cranks and both connected people with others (one in real time, the other through music). These and other inspirations motivated young Philo to invent what was to become known as the television. His early story is fascinatingly told and well illustrated.

You may not have heard of Edwin Binney but chances are you’ve used his invention: Crayola crayons. Binney’s determination to come up with ways for children to create and draw with non-dusty color led to the invention. His life and legacy (and even how the name Crayola was crafted) makes a memorable story. Illustrated in color and brought right up to contemporary crayon making, this is a fascinating and well documented look at one man’s continuing legacy.

After touring a German submarine in the early 1940s, young Raye set her sights on becoming an engineer and becoming a pioneer who changed the course of ship design forever.

Using his ingenuity and tenacity, Garrett overcame racial barriers and forged a career as a successful businessman and inventor. But when a tunnel collapsed, trapping twenty men, the rescue would test both Garrett's invention — and his courage.

Girls like Raye Montague were not supposed to like math or science, or go to engineering school. But tenacious Raye had a plan, one that eventually took her all the way to the US Navy. There, she was assigned an impossible task: to come up with a single computer program that could design every part of a ship. This book celebrates a self-made engineer who worked around anyone and anything that stood in her way.

The true story of Beauty, the wild bald eagle that made world news when she was illegally shot, rescued, and received a pioneering, 3D-printed prosthetic beak. After months of research and rehabilitation, Beauty takes the first drink of water by herself with her new beak.

Mary Golda Ross designed classified airplanes and spacecraft as Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's first female engineer. Learn how her passion for math and the Cherokee values she was raised with shaped her life and work.

“Curious Jane” activities started as a summer project to keep the author’s girls engaged. It has since grown, encouraging young readers to make, experiment, and explore crafts as well as ideas for budding designers and inventors. All activities are clearly presented, easy to follow, use readily accessible materials, and let kids know when an adult should be called in. Sure to inspire young scientists and makers!

Our lives would be unrecognizable without the countless scientific discoveries and technological inventions by Indigenous North Americans. Spanning topics from transportation to civil engineering, hunting technologies, astronomy, brain surgery, architecture, and agriculture, the book acquaints readers with the contributions of Indigenous innovators and includes fun, simple activities and experiments that kids can do to better understand and enjoy the principles used by Indigenous inventors.

The first in the Accelerati Trilogy, 14-year old Nick, his younger brother and his father have moved from Tampa (FL) to a ramshackle Victorian house in Colorado Springs. Peculiar things happen when items from the attic are sold. Could they really be inventions from inventor Nicola Tesla? Intrigue with plenty of humor and likeable characters in a fast-pace will leave readers awaiting the next book.

Journey to the wave-battered coast of the Pacific Northwest to meet some of the engineers and scientists working to harness the punishing force of our oceans, one of the nature’s powerful and renewable energy sources.