Ingenious
Subtitle: a true story of invention, automotive daring, and the race to revive America
By: Jason Fagone
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group, The
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 375
ISBN-13: 9780307591487; 9780307591494; 9780307591500
Copyright date: 2013
Subjects: Creative ability; Energy consumption; SOCIAL SCIENCE; TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING; Automotive; Technological innovations; Industrial development projects; Anthropology; Research; Competitions; Automobiles; Cultural; Inventions; Design and construction; Inventors
Description: "An epic tale of invention, in which ordinary people's lives are changed forever by a quest that combines elements of the Olympics, NASCAR, Junkyard Wars, the Longitude Prize of 1714, and the Apollo program In 2006, science-fiction enthusiast Peter Diamandis announced he would give $10 million to anyone who could build a safe, mass-producible car that traveled 100 miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas. Anyone. The challenge attracted more than 300 teams from all over the world, including dozens of amateurs. Many designed their cars entirely from scratch, rejecting decades of thinking about what a car should look like. This book follows four teams from the build stage to the final race and beyond. One team hacked together an electric-powered dreamboat in an old pole barn in central Illinois. A team based in Virginia built a car so light that you could push it across the floor with your thumb. A third team was a Southern California start-up with a car that looked like an alien egg. A fourth was an inner-city high school. Fagone takes the reader into the garages and the minds of the inventors, capturing their passions, and traces the development of the cars in prose that renders automotive engineering romantic and vivid even to nongeeks. Written with propulsive energy and emotion, this is the bighearted story of ordinary people risking failure, economic ruin, and ridicule to create something Detroit had said was impossible. As the Illinois team wrote in chalk on the wall of their barn, "SOMEONE HAS TO DO SOMETHING, AND THAT SOMEONE IS US.""--
Table of contents: title: A nation of inventors; title: Shakedown. Kevin and Jen ; Space kids ; The abyss of lightness ; Ride or die ; Immigrants ; Engineers ; Yoda and Little Old Man ; Wingless ; The hypocrisy the masturbating hand endures ; Edison2 welcomes informed comment ; The moose test; title: Knockout. The Nobel Prize in engineering ; Yesterday today and forever ; Fit and finish ; Little red Corvette ; This whole new scale ; Lungs cannot oxidize ; Voodoo Steve ; Heat ; Goonies never say die; title: The ragged edge. The greatest place on earth ; The race ; Capitol Hill ; Traction ; The Old Frontage Road; title: Airborne.