Inventors

Behind the machines that changed American daily life, Philip Gengembre Hubert looks for the people who imagined and built them. His biographical collection follows inventors including Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, Charles Goodyear, Samuel F. B. Morse, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Technical explanations serve the life stories, while the preface draws attention to financial hardship, public doubt and the difficulty of securing fair rewards for useful work.

Franklin's chapter presents practical curiosity as a public service, ranging from an improved stove to libraries and postal arrangements. The Morse section sets a failed underwater cable experiment beside the public celebrations that later honored him, then turns to his quiet routines at home. Readers interested in the human side of engineering will find an account of persistence and recognition, as well as a period argument about patents and the social value of invention.