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Author | David Macaulay Neil Ardley |
---|---|
Illustrator | Macaulay |
Language | English |
Genre | Educational |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Publication date | 1988 |
Publication place | United States |
Pages | 400 |
ISBN | 0-395-42857-2 |
OCLC | 17917341 |
600 19 | |
LC Class | T47 .M18 1988 |
The Way Things Work is a 1988 nonfiction book by David Macaulay with technical text by Neil Ardley. It is a whimsical introduction to everyday machines and the scientific principles behind their operation, describing machines as simple as levers and gears and as complicated as radio telescopes and automatic transmissions. Every page consists primarily of one or more large diagrams describing the operation of the relevant machine. These diagrams are informative but playful, in that most show the machines operated, used upon, or represented by woolly mammoths, and are accompanied by anecdotes from a mysterious inventor of the mammoths' (fictive) role in the operation. The book's concept was later developed into two short-lived animated TV shows (the former produced by Millimages [1] and distributed by Schlessinger Media, and the latter produced by Children's Television Workshop and Film Roman), a Dorling Kindersley interactive CD-ROM (including a spin-off pinball game, Pinball Science), and a board game. A family "ride" involving animatronics and a 3-D film based on the book was one of the original attractions at the San Francisco Metreon, but closed in 2001.
A revised and updated version, The New Way Things Work, released on October 26, 1998, contains additional text on the workings of computers and digital technology. A number of pages were dropped, among them a two-page demonstration of a mechanical coin-operated parking meter and the original descriptions of computing. The original's computing section included four pages explaining the workings and the distinctions between a calculator and a general-purpose computer, and four pages on binary arithmetic, logical AND and OR gates, and how these are assembled into a half adder and full adder; these were replaced with entirely new art and more detailed descriptions, with a longer story, 'The Last Mammoth', depicting a lonely mammoth invited to visit the 'Digital Domain' by its proprietor Bill, [2] which uses the mammoth's assistance and a humorous pumpkin-and-apple-based mechanical computer to create a video depiction of a community of mammoths. Like the previous version, a CD-ROM version was released.
A substantially revised edition, The Way Things Work Now, was published in October 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Dorling Kindersley.
With a glossary of technical terms and an index at the back of the book. While the individual sections and subsections are changed in The Way Things Work Now, the structure and Table of Contents remain the same.
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David Macaulay is a British-born American illustrator and writer. His works include Cathedral (1973), The Way Things Work (1988), and its updated revisions The New Way Things Work (1998) and The Way Things Work Now (2016). His illustrations have been featured in nonfiction books combining text and illustrations explaining architecture, design, and engineering, and he has written a number of children's fiction books.
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The Way Things Work was a short-lived children's television series based on the best-selling book of the same name by David Macaulay. The series was co-produced by Millimages, Pearson Broadband, and Schlessinger Media; it was distributed by the latter. The program ran daily on BBC2 and CBBC from 2001 to early 2002, before it was discontinued due to a lack of both episodes and audience. The series (hand-animated) was one of the last few educational TV programmes still shown by the BBC on CBBC. It is one of its most short-lived television series, running for only 26 15-minute episodes. The programme aims to teach basic principles of science to young viewers and revolves around the residents of the backward Mammoth Island as they struggle through daily life with the use of outlandish contraptions. The series was later dubbed into French and briefly aired in syndication on TV network France 5. A DVD containing all 26 episodes of the series was released in 2005.
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