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A beautiful and thrilling round-up of 32 of the best Magnificent Machines from across history by Blue Peter award-winning David Long.
The longest ship ever built, the heaviest digger and the largest aeroplane, the world’s first working motorcar, and its most expensive one. What machines like these have in common is that they all say a lot about the inventiveness and imagination of the people who conceived and created them. Some of them are useful, others are just a bit of fun, but the best ones are truly magnificent, and fascinating to discover.
Designed to drive faster, fly higher, carry more cargo or – in the case of space rockets – travel hundreds of thousands of miles to places no-one has ever been before, not every idea has worked but the best have been inspired and inspirational, and in a few cases they have gone on to change the world.
It is the human stories and atmospheric art that make this a book to actually read and delight in.
Writer and historian David Long is the author of the acclaimed Animals’ VC: For Gallantry and Devotion and more than twenty other non-fiction books on a wide range of historical subjects. Jet the Rescue Dog, the first of several titles for younger readers, was published by Faber in 2014. He lives in Suffolk and has two teenage sons.
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