Biographies for Middle Schoolers: Genius Inventors

Albert Einstein. His name has become a synonym for genius. His wild case of bedhead and playful sense of humor made him a media superstar - the first, maybe only, scientist-celebrity. He wasn't much for lab work; in fact he had a tendency to blow up experiments. What he liked to do was think, not in words but in "thought pictures." What was the result of all his thinking? Nothing less than the overturning of Newtonian physics. Once again, Kathleen Krull delivers a witty and astute look at one of the true "Giants of Science" and the turbulent times in which he lived.

Here is a man with an imagination so large that just “by thinking on it,” he invented calculus and figured out the scientific explanation of gravity. Kathleen Krull presents a portrait of Isaac Newton that will challenge your beliefs about a genius whose amazing discoveries changed the world.

For more than thirty years-half his life-he was obsessively devoted to investigating Everything in the natural world. Nothing escaped his interest-how our eyes see, why the sky is blue, what forces build mountains, how light travels, where water comes from, and-most fascinating of all to Leonardo-the inner workings of the human body. Nothing stopped him. It was illegal to dissect human corpses, so he did autopsies in secret, even devising a clever way to slice through eyeballs (notoriously squishy!).

Talk about a “glowing reputation”! Marie Curie, the woman who coined the term radioactivity, won not just one Nobel prize but two—in physics and in chemistry, both supposedly girl-phobic sciences. As with her previous star-studded biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Sigmund Freud—all three chosen as ALA Notable Books—Kathleen Krull offers readers a fascinating portrait of this mythic “giant of science” who abhorred publicity. And she also places Curie’s ground-breaking discovery of two elements within the framework of science at that time.

Driven: A Photobiography of Henry Ford is a riveting profile of the man whose invention revolutionized American life: the industrial visionary who changed the automobile from rich man's toy into affordable necessity. Don Mitchell weaves archival images from the Benson Ford Research Center with quotes from Ford's writings, speeches, and interviews to create a lively, comprehensive profile of this intriguing individual. Fiercely independent, and a man of complex contradictions, Henry Ford is revealed above all as a man driven to achieve his dream of building "a motor car for the great multitude," accessible to all. Driven includes a time line, resource list, and index.

This fascinating collection of remarkable deaths relays all the gory details of how 19 world figures gave up the ghost, including King Tut, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry VIII, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein.

"An inspiring true story of a boy genius. "Plowing a potato field in 1920, a 14-year-old farm boy from Idaho saw in the parallel rows of overturned earth a way to "make pictures fly through the air." This boy was not a magician; he was a scientific genius and just eight years later he made his brainstorm in the potato field a reality by transmitting the world's first television image. This fascinating picture-book biography of Philo Farnsworth covers his early interest in machines and electricity, leading up to how he put it all together in one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. The author's afterword discusses the lawsuit Farnsworth waged and won against RCA when his high school science teacher testified that Philo's invention of television was years before RCA's. "From the Hardcover edition."