Use the Magic Lens to reveal the inner workings of the machines all around us

Transform and recycle household objects into your very own home-made toys and machines! Learn about the centre of gravity by making a balancing bird, create a toroidal vortex with a smoke-ring machine, and turn a spoon into an electromagnet. Chances are you won't need to buy the materials required for these machines because they're all in your house right now. Every child can be an engineer with the help of Mr Shaha and his marvellous machines. Written by a science teacher and dad, Mr Shaha's Marvellous Machinesis the highly anticipated sequel to Mr Shaha's Recipes for Wonder. This book gives clear, step-by-step instructions for over 15 projects. Whether you're a master engineer or a total beginner, it will spark inspiration for fun activities to engage young people in the marvels of machinery.

You're standing in front of an old card table in a driveway at a garage sale. On that table is a one-quart aluminum saucepan, a votive candle holder, pieces of some office machinery, and a wooden awards plaque. What do you see there? If you did not answer "a six-cylinder radial electromagnetic attraction motor," then you need this book!H.P. Friedrichs (author of The Voice of the Crystal and Instruments of Amplification) returns this time to explore the principles behind the operation and construction of five simple, yet impressive, model electric motors.Aspiring mechanical model makers are often discouraged by their lack of access to machine tools, like mills, lathes, or drill presses. Friedrichs demonstrates that with some basic knowledge, an open eye, and a sharp mind, one can use commonly available (and often discarded) parts and materials to engineer one's way around any lack of expensive machine tooling. In fact, every motor in this book was built from scrap, and can be assembled with hand tools.You'll learn where to hunt for and find materials, and where to salvage suitable bearings. You'll know where useful solenoids can be extracted from scrap, and how to fabricate bobbins to wind your own. You'll learn how to time your motors, fashion a connecting rod, make a commutator from scratch, use a hall effect sensor to detect magnet position, use a transistor as a switch, and much more.Hardcover, 160 pages,177 photos and illustrations. THE AUTHOR H.P. Friedrichs is a degreed electrical engineer (BSEE), inventor, and author with more than three decades of experience working in domains ranging from audio, medical, and radio, to software, automotive, and aerospace. At present, he is a Principal Engineer with Honeywell, involved in the design and support of specialized equipment used for testing and validating aircraft power generation products.He has five U.S. patents to his credit and holds three radio licenses including Extra-Class Amateur (AC7ZL), Commercial Radio Operator with Radar Endorsement and GMDSSOperator/Maintainer with Radar Endorsement. He is also a certified VE.

A magical, captivating picture book about the power of love between a son and his father Tom and his dad are good at making things. Their inventions start out simple, but they quickly become bigger, faster, crazier - and they almost always involve wheels. But then Dad loses his job, and everything changes. Sadness clouds the house like a winter sky. That is, until Tom comes up with a brilliant plan that takes their amazing vehicle inventions and creates something astounding - something the world has never seen before . . . An emotionally charged and highly imaginative book that explores themes of love and support between children and their parents but is also great fun, with incredible inventions, crazy contraptions and a wonderfully inspiring pioneering spirit at its heart.

The Monster in the Machine tracks the ways in which human beings were defined in contrast to supernatural and demonic creatures during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Zakiya Hanafi recreates scenes of Italian life and culture from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries to show how monsters were conceptualized at this particular locale and historical juncture—a period when the sacred was being supplanted by a secular, decidedly nonmagical way of looking at the world. Noting that the word “monster” is derived from the Latin for “omen” or “warning,” Hanafi explores the monster’s early identity as a portent or messenger from God. Although monsters have always been considered “whatever we are not,” they gradually were tranformed into mechanical devices when new discoveries in science and medicine revealed the mechanical nature of the human body. In analyzing the historical literature of monstrosity, magic, and museum collections, Hanafi uses contemporary theory and the philosophy of technology to illuminate the timeless significance of the monster theme. She elaborates the association between women and the monstrous in medical literature and sheds new light on the work of Vico—particularly his notion of the conatus—by relating it to Vico’s own health. By explicating obscure and fascinating texts from such disciplines as medicine and poetics, she invites the reader to the piazzas and pulpits of seventeenth-century Naples, where poets, courtiers, and Jesuit preachers used grotesque figures of speech to captivate audiences with their monstrous wit. Drawing from a variety of texts from medicine, moral philosophy, and poetics, Hanafi’s guided tour through this baroque museum of ideas will interest readers in comparative literature, Italian literature, history of ideas, history of science, art history, poetics, women’s studies, and philosophy.

With her sketchbook labeled My Inventions and her father's toolbox, Mattie could make almost anything – toys, sleds, and a foot warmer. When she was just twelve years old, Mattie designed a metal guard to prevent shuttles from shooting off textile looms and injuring workers. As an adult, Mattie invented the machine that makes the square-bottom paper bags we still use today. However, in court, a man claimed the invention was his, stating that she "could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities." Marvelous Mattie proved him wrong, and over the course of her life earned the title of "the Lady Edison." With charming pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations, this introduction to one of the most prolific female inventors will leave readers inspired. Marvelous Mattie is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.