Edward Garboczi
Tag: Book Review
View on Biblioguides
We expect scientists to carry out reproducible, laboratory science to reveal how God made His creation to operate. Engineers take this knowledge and use it to design and make things like bridges, cars, 3D printers, and millions of other machines and parts. But engineers have also done fundamental research and scientists have also built new machines. And just where do inventors come into the picture? They can be scientists or engineers and they are the ones who conceive of and reduce to practice technology what had not been thought of previously. Usually, people are one of the three, and rarely do two of these three labels apply to any single person. The books that are reviewed here, on George Washington Carver and Orville and Wilbur Wright, show that these special men fit into all three classifications, which is very rare indeed. What is more, all three of these men were Christians with a personal faith.
The Wright Brothers were inventors, because they invented the wing-warping mechanism that made them able to have controlled flight. They were master engineers who designed and built a light-weight but powerful aluminum engine that enabled them to have powered, controlled flight. And before all this, they invented, designed, and built a wind tunnel, which they used to measure fundamental wing parameters that nobody had ever measured correctly before. Those who had used the old published data did not have a hope at success. Orville and Wilbur looked to God’s creation for their inspiration and encouragement, especially for their way to control the airplane, which no one had ever done before.
“Our own growing belief that man might nevertheless learn to fly was based on the idea that while thousands of the most dissimilar body structures, such as insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, were flying every day at pleasure, it was reasonable to suppose that man might also fly.”
The Wright Brothers, by Charles Ludwig, is a well-written, knowledgeable book, which delves further into the stories of their lives and accomplishments. It is probably at an advanced middle school to early high school level.
Similar to the Wright Brothers, George Washington Carver was a scientist, inventor, and engineer, but in biology, not aeronautics. He was a high-ranking biologist who made new discoveries of the basic properties of common agricultural products such as sweet potatoes and peanuts. He was an outstanding inventor who dreamed up hundreds of useful applications of these farm products. He was a creative bioengineer who developed the chemical and physical processes that turned sweet potatoes and peanuts into these products.
I have toured Carver’s laboratory at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. What he accomplished is still impressive even today for a team of people using modern instruments! Later in his life, he said, “The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible, ‘In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths’” (Proverbs 3:6).
The book George Washington Carver by David Collins does justice to this great man who was born a slave but went far beyond that humble beginning to earn a place as one of the greatest Americans. This book can be appreciated by a reader who is at an advanced middle school or high school level.