It Looked Good on Paper: Bizarre Inventions, Design Disasters, and Engineering Follies

A remarkable compendium of wild schemes, mad plans, crazy inventions, and truly glorious disasters

Every phenomenally bad idea seemed like a good idea to someone. How else can you explain the Ford Edsel or the sword pistol—absolutely absurd creations that should have never made it off the drawing board? It Looked Good on Paper gathers together the most flawed plans, half-baked ideas, and downright ridiculous machines throughout history that some second-rate Einstein decided to foist on an unsuspecting populace with the best and most optimistic intentions. Some failed spectacularly. Others fizzled after great expense. One even crashed on Mars. But every one of them at one time must have looked good on paper, including:

The lead water pipes of RomeThe Tacoma Narrows Bridge—built to collapseThe Hubble telescope—the $2 billion scientific marvel that couldn’t seeThe Spruce Goose—Howard Hughes’s airborne atrocity: big, expensive, slow, unstable, and made of wood

With more than thirty-five chapters full of incredibly insipid inventions, both infamous and obscure, It Looked Good on Paper is a mind-boggling, endlessly entertaining collection of fascinating failures.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001P9O2YU
Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins e-books (January 9, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 9, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 652 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 370 pages