Right at the beginning of the book, Mike Goldsmith comments “you’ll notice that the inventors in this book stop inventing somewhere around the 1930s. That’s because from then on most inventions… were thought up by big companies.” Apart from the obvious observation that companies can’t think, this is a bit of a surprise. I had assumed the cut off date was to ensure, as the series title suggests, that the people involved were both dead and famous. Oh well. But the more significant reason it’s a bit of a surprise is, that when you come to look at it, very few of Goldsmith’s inventors actually came up with their idea on their own either – almost all of them were improving something that was already around or working in parallel with other people and happened to get there first. That’s not a problem, but makes the reasoning a little odd.

It’s inevitable that this book gets compared with Goldsmith’s other similar book, Scientists & their mind-blowing experiments. Though his rather worrying obsession with doing down religion only pops up once this time, Inventors somehow lacks the oomph of Scientists. Perhaps it is, in part, this need to keep saying that they didn’t really think of things. It’s not a bad book, not at all, just not quite as good. There are plenty of surprises too. I keep getting told off by arguing with the teachers at my children’s school that Edison didn’t invent the light bulb – they obviously hadn’t read this book!

Who to choose? Always a difficult one. Goldsmith plumped for a cast iron set: Archimedes, Leonardo, Watt, Stephenson, Edison, Bell, Wright Brothers, Marconi and Baird (he’s the absolute gem of the set, so a great one to finish with). We get a good mix of their life and work, ably supported by the illustrations (though not so intrusively as in series like Horrible Science). Any regrets? When Goldsmith was introducing the concept of a patent, it would have been nice if he’d told people how to pronounce it as (in the UK at least) it’s usually pronounced incorrectly. But it’s a good solid job – just not a stunner.

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Review by Martin O'Brien

We all love those top n lists. You know. The hundred best film moments. The top ten places to visit in the world. So it must very tempting to sit down and list the nine most significant scientists from history (who are dead). To be fair, Mike Goldsmith doesn’t say this is what he was doing, but surely it must have been in his mind.

Given the big nine – and we’ll just keep you in suspense a moment longer – we then get to hear a bit about their biographies, about their work, and in the end what their significant contributions to science were. On the whole it works very well. Each section gives a self contained and enjoyable picture (some a little better than others), but overall you get a feel of things building. It does inevitably reinforce the model of few great geniuses changing the world, a model that is rather out of fashion these days, but given the limitations of the format that’s nearly inevitable.

So who did he choose? The obvious ones – Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin and Einstein. The slightly less obvious – Aristotle, Mendel, Pasteur and Madame Curie. Most of my obvious five work well and need little comment. Einstein is the weakest, perhaps because there’s so much to cover that it seems rushed. There is also a glaring error at the start of Galileo’s chapter, when it says that Greek writings were rediscovered in the fifteenth century – it’s rather odd if this the case that the likes of Roger Bacon were studying these Greek works at university in the 1200s and writing about them at great length. But things generally go pretty well. (He does also keep alive the myth that Faraday gave his famous Ray Vibrations speech when Wheatstone ran away scared, though it has since been proved that Wheatstone wasn’t scheduled to speak that night.) But what of the others?

At first sight, Aristotle is an odd choice, as he has often been blamed for holding science back for nearly 2,000 years. But Goldsmith uses Aristotle rather as an example of the Greek move away from myth and guesswork to a more logical approach of trying to work out how the world worked. Some might suggest that Archimedes would have been a better choice, because most of his stuff was right, where Aristotle was almost entirely wrong, but that would be unfair. Pasteur makes a lot of sense, not only for the microbial work but a surprise contribution to crystallography – and anyway he was such an odious character it makes sense. Curie, realistically, is probably there because otherwise there wouldn’t be a woman. That leaves Mendel, perhaps the oddest of the choices, in that his work, while extremely important, covered much less ground than the others. We could all suggest, I suspect, half a dozen replacements (let’s start with Maxwell and Feynman)… but then that’s the fun of it all.

One other slightly worrying feature is that the book has an unusually strong anti-religious subtext. While it’s certainly true that religion has got in the way of science over the years (Galileo would hardly disagree), Goldsmith’s repeated comments verge on the obsessive and are in the end a gross oversimplification.

However, luckily this negative strand doesn’t impact highly on the value of the content, and because this works very well, keeps the pages turning and manages to provide a good view of these remarkable people in a very tight space, this book is still deserving of its four stars.

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Review by Brian Clegg

There is little doubt that Einstein was the famous scientist ever, pipping even Newton (who turns up, very peevish, in this book) to the post. It means he’s one of the few scientists that has proved interesting to the public in his own right – and this book provides a good balance of the man, his life and times and his science.

Just occasionally this grates slightly. The unremittingly jokey approach of the Scholastic children’s science books sounds a bit uncomfortable when describing the break-up of Einstein’s first marriage, or the complexities of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. On the other hand it often works very well to explain some of Einstein’s key contributions to science. After all, he wasn’t hugely happy about maths himself for much of his life, which means there are few scary equations.

A couple of other slight concerns. The regular ‘scary science warnings’ are supposed to tell you the next bit seems a little tricky, but is quite possible to cope with – but could equally make you feel that the next bit is too hard to bother with. And there a couple of moments of factual iffiness, such as when the sun is described as being made of gas, and most particularly in the explanation of Einstein’s realization that light travels at a constant speed. The argument used is effectively circular, while Einstein’s real argument was based on the nature of light as electromagnetic radiation, and isn’t even mentioned (though there’s a strange, coy reference to James Clerk Maxwell).

This apart, however, there is a good explanation of special relativity and its consequences, an reasonable attempts at general relativity and the photo-electric effect, though Einstein’s resistance to quantum theory could be better handled.

All in all, it might be the conclusion you come to is that it’s worth waiting until the reader can cope with a grown-up book on Einstein, like Gribbin & White’s Einstein, a Life in Science, and to look out for the moment for a children’s book on relativity (we’ll link to one as soon as we’ve got one reviewed) or light (like Frightening Light), rather than taking the approach of this book. There’s nothing really wrong with it – as always in these series, the cartoons are often a great help – but it just doesn’t click the way some do.

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Review by Jo Reed

Like many children’s popular science books, this is really a cross between a popular science book and a text book – it doesn’t have the end-to-end readable flow of a true popular science book, tending to operate more as a set of mini-articles. But this isn’t too much of a problem, and the writing is enjoyable without being condescending.

In covering robots, Mike Goldsmith starts us off with fictional robots, looks at their applications in work and at home, then in the wider reaches of space and the sea, before heading off into future possibilities. There’s plenty of good material in here, though not many of the people around the robots emerge as personalities – the machines win every time.

He’s at his weakest when dealing with fiction. At least thee of the facts are wrong – he confuses the film of Frankenstein with the book, saying that in the book Frankenstein’s monster is matey “until it discovers… its somewhat terrifying appearance” – in fact, in the book the monster is very attractive in appearance, and it goes to pieces agonising over its soul or lack of one. He also refers to Daleks as robots, though later slightly redeems himself by classing them as cyborgs, and says the robot in Metropolis has no name, when it is clearly called the robot Maria.

That fictional hiccups aren’t too bad though, and once he gets onto the real things, Goldsmith goes great guns. In fact it’s a shame that more TV fiction writers (got this, Joss Whedon of Buffy fame?) couldn’t take a leaf out of Goldsmith’s book in realizing just how hard it is to make a robot that’s anything like a real person. Our favourite robot? The slug powered bot that crawls around the garden catching pests and eating them.

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Review by Jo Reed

**** Riotous Robots was great, it had so many fun and exciting facts. I liked the time line best; it showed all the different robots from 1499 to 2003, it was so interesting. If I had to choose a robot I would choose… Aibo. He is a robot pet; he’s a dog. The first version of him was built in 1999.

I have learned lots of things about robots, space and under the water. I liked the spacebots chapter as it had lots of information on robots that had gone to the moon (or failed to go to the moon). My favourite seabot was Jason Junior as he was an underwater explorer and I like the sea.

I give this book four stars – very good to excellent – because I learned lots of things. Although I enjoyed this book I would not read lots of these as I find it difficult to remember all the facts.

I enjoyed how the book was written as Dr Mike Goldsmith added in lots of funny illustrations that had humorous speech. It made it easier to read as the pictures broke up the writing.

Review by Josie, Aged 11