Book Review

This book, well-aimed at kids in the middle grades, opens with a quick little history of humanpowered vehicles, centered on the bicycle. Yepsen reminds us that there were two times of fast progress in this domain; the Golden Age of the safety two-wheelers in the 1890s, and again today. In between, human engines deferred to the new hot little noisy box, the gasoline engine, a "barn full of power for a sip of fuel".

... Musclepowered boats are the oldest of all, as canoes, kayaks, and rowboats evidence. ... Flight is the last challenge to humanpower, first met in 1979 by Paul MacCready's huge, fragile Gossamer aircraft.

The best our author offers young readers is to study the basics of science, so as to prepare to join the college-student engineers now working so well on pedal power. This is a readable and informed summary, with a fine list of books to take you faster and farther.

~ Philip amd Phylis Morrison, Scientific American exerpt