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Review - Evil Inventions - Nick Arnold

With his excellent illustrator Tony De Saulles, Nick Arnold takes on the business of inventions. It's worth saying up front that there isn't a lot of science in this entry in the Horrible Science series, but that doesn't stop it being a book that manages to be fun and informative.

The nice thing about the topic is that Arnold can flip between totally lunatic inventions, like a parachute that attaches to the head, and some of the real inventions that have changed the world. Because of the "horrible" theme, he also includes some truly evil inventions, including the guillotine and the electric chair. He mentions Edison's involvement in the latter (but not that Edison first used his opponent's system, to show how dangerous it was). As far as the guillotine is concerned, as in a number of other points in the book, he gives us an "I didn't know that" moment when pointing out that Guillotine didn't invent the device, just popularized it. (If popularized is the right word.) Edison also gets a bit on his life as an inventor - though Arnold misses a trick by not describing how Edison started as a boy, with his travelling newspaper office/lab in a railway carriage, which would make a great story. Mechanical inventions, perhaps because of relative time in use, get a much bigger splash than electrical and electronic. There's probably about half the book given over to modes of transport, for instance. But most of the significant contributions in the electrical/electronic field do get a mention, and they're much harder to explain in the snappy, quick fire manner of a book like this. It would be easy to list areas that should have been covered but aren't - optical inventions, for instance - but there was no way everything was going to get in.

There are few real criticisms to make here. It is perhaps a little more obsessed with poo than most, it's a bit dated on TV (only showing cathode ray tubes) and there's one very odd little box, but apart from that it flows along energetically and effectively. The odd box is about Morse code. The readers are encouraged to use this to communicate secretly in class, but Arnold points out that some elderly teachers 'learned Morse code back in the First World War', so could overhear them. Assuming they joined up in the last year, and were 15 but lied about their age, this would make these teachers 104 at the time the book was published - even an education service struggling to find good staff probably doesn't employ many 104-year-olds.

All in all, then, an enjoyable read with some fascinating facts. There isn't a lot of science, which pushes it down from five stars, but it's still well worth giving it a go.

Only in paperback

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

* Our age range recommendation is an estimated guide, but individual readers outside the range could still enjoy the book!

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