The Perpetual Motion Machine

Author: Paul Scheerbart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984115549
Category : Perpetual motion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a "two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination." Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With "toiling wheels" inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion

Author: Dexter Palmer
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429959177
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. As Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda's life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.

Version Control

Author: Dexter Palmer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307950352
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Book Description
Although Rebecca Wright has pieced her life back together after a major tragedy, she can’t shake a sense that the world around her feels off-kilter. Meanwhile, her husband’s dedication to his invention, “the causality violation device” (which he would greatly prefer you not call a time machine) has effectively stalled his career—but he may be closer to success than either of them can possibly imagine. Emotionally powerful and wickedly intelligent, Version Control is a stunningly prescient novel about the effects of science and technology on our lives, our friendships, and our sense of self that will alter the way you see the future—and the present.

Great Inventors and Their Inventions

Author: Frank Puterbaugh Bachman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Inventions
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Nine remarkable men produced inventions that changed the world. The printing press, the telephone, powered flight, recording and others have made the modern world what it is. But who were the men who had these ideas and made reality of them? As David Angus shows, they were very different quiet, boisterous, confident, withdrawn but all had a moment of vision allied to single-minded determination to battle through numerous prototypes and produced something that really worked. It is a fascinating account for younger listeners.

Oddities

Author: Rupert Thomas Gould
Publisher: London : P. Allan
ISBN:
Category : Curiosities and wonders
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description

The Story of Great Inventions

Author: Elmer Ellsworth Burns
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781021107954
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
From the printing press to the steam engine to the telephone, Burns' engaging and accessible book offers a compelling overview of the major inventions that shaped human history. Drawing on primary sources and his own extensive research, Burns chronicles the individuals and ideas that drove technological progress and transformed the world we live in. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Time Machine illustrated

Author: H. G. Wells
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN: 2384370014
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a science fiction classic, which lends itself well to visualization. This version, illustrated by Yoann Laurent-Rouault, an illustrator master who graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and published in the international literary collection Memoria Books, is a reference on the time travel theme. Wells transports us in the year 802 701, in a society made up of the “Elois”, who live peacefully in a kind of big Garden of Eden, eating fruits and sleeping high up, while underground lives another species, also descending from men, the “Morlocks”, who do not stand the light anymore, living in the dark for too long now. At night, they return to the surface, going back up by the wells, in order to kidnap some Elois that they eat ; these last became livestock unknowingly. In The Time Machine, made into a movie several times, the last of them in 2002 by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells, time is both a pretext to move the class struggle and warn... and also, in a way, a full character, who fascinates, arbitrates, transcends... The illustrations come to reinforce the time travel and provide a new experience to the reader.

The Inventor and the Tycoon

Author: Edward Ball
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0767929403
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.

The Story of Inventions

Author: Frank P. Bachman
Publisher: Christian Liberty Press
ISBN: 9781932971200
Category : Inventions
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Great inventions, historical biographies, strong morals, and the godly character traits necessary for success are highlighted in this collection of stories. From the steam engine and the printing press to television and computers, a wide range of inventions is covered in short chapters that include reading comprehension questions. For older elementary students. 354 pages, softcover from Christian Liberty Press.

Perpetual Motion

Author: Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume
Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press
ISBN: 9781931882514
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
The deceptively simple task of making a mechanism which would turn forever has fascinated many famous men and physicists throughout the centuries. In fact, the basic tenets of engineering grew from the failures of these perpetual motion machine designers. This work offers an illustrated overview of perpetual motion machines and their inventors.