Mushrooms are everywhere.
They are beautiful, noisome, delicious or deadly, depending on how you choose them. His love for his subject suffuses his writing in this relatively brief text. The devices documented in this volume, ranging from a hand-carried outboard motor to mine elevators and hydraulic presses more than six stories tall, have shaped modern life so thoroughly that it is difficult to imagine where we would be without them. Yet the originals were often sold for scrap or today lie in pieces in corporate attics. This book from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers not only gives succinct descriptions but reveals where some of the surviving wonders of human invention can be seen and touched.