Mike Green (Editor-in-Chief of ECN’s sister publication EPN) published his first book, ‘The Nearly Men: A Chronicle of Scientific Failure’ which investigates some of the most important inventions and scientific discoveries of the last four hundred years, and attempts to uncover the stories of deceit and ill fortune behind each of them. It looks beyond what the common reference sources tend to tell us, and aims to identify the individuals who were truly responsible for the technological advances that have defined the modern age; such as the microchip, the computer, the light bulb, the telephone, radio communication, the laws of planetary motion and even the theory of evolution.
Among the tales of treachery included are:
Antonio Meucci – Who despite developing the first telephone spent his whole life in poverty, while Alexander Graham Bell got all the glory.
Alan Turing – Whose huge strides in the conception of the first generation of computers were destined to never to be fully attributed to him, due to his untimely death.
Robert Hooke – Who postulated, amongst other things, the true nature of planetary motion, only to witness his rival Isaac Newton take all the praise for it.
Nikola Tesla – Who died almost totally penniless, while the ideas he had put forward for radio communication made Guglielmo Marconi a fortune.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – Who correctly surmised that living things evolved, over sixty years before Charles Darwin publicised the fact, but was to die in ignominy with his ideas not appreciated.
Geoffrey Dummer - Whose musings on the development of the integrated circuit preceded those of Bob Noyce and Jack Kilby by almost a decade, but due to lack of vision by the British Government his plans were never to make it off the drawing board.
Joseph Swan – Who despite having the technical expertise that allowed him to design the first workable electric light bulb, was no match for the commercial machinations of adversary Thomas Edison.
The book is available through Amazon at
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nearly-Men-Historys-Greatest-Innovations/dp/0752442325/ref=sr_1_1/203-5620034-0550300?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187187887&sr=1-1
