Famous in STEM · Volume 7

Extraordinary Engineers

20 builders who engineered the modern world

A 21-year-old swept off his feet when the Thames burst into his tunnel. The first person to ride across the Brooklyn Bridge: the woman many people assumed was its real engineer. A rocket designer whose metal ball circled the Earth every 96 minutes. Extraordinary Engineers tells the true stories of 20 builders who engineered the modern world, from James Watt and Gustave Eiffel to Claude Shannon and Fazlur Rahman Khan.

Paperback

Also see all formats on Amazon, including hardcover where available.

20 chapters
Ages 13+
Read in any order
2026 edition
By Javier Sanz

About this book

Bridges, towers, tunnels, railways, rockets and the bit, told through the builders who engineered the modern world.

Each chapter explains one engineering idea in plain words: why bigger ships are cheaper to run, how a suspension bridge holds up a road, why a tube makes a skyscraper stand, what an orbit really is. Try-this boxes use drink cans, balloons and paper to show the ideas at work.

Engineers are the people who make ideas stand up. A scientist can tell you that a cable is strong in tension and a stone pillar is strong in compression. An engineer has to hang a road across a river with them, and then watch a hundred thousand people walk over it on opening day. If the arithmetic is wrong, everyone knows by lunchtime. I find that thrilling, and I hope by the end of this book you will too.

From “Before you start,” the book’s introduction

Who’s inside

All 20 engineers

Each chapter title and big idea, exactly as they appear in the book.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel
1806–1859
The engineer who believed bigger was cheaper

Big ideaDouble a ship’s size and its cargo grows eight times while its drag grows only about four. Build big.
Gustave Eiffel
1832–1923
The man who let the wind draw his tower

Big ideaShape a tall structure so the wind’s push is met by its own spread, and iron can stand 300 meters high.
James Watt
1736–1819
The repairman who noticed where the heat was going

Big ideaKeep the cylinder hot and cool the steam somewhere else. The engine burns a third to a quarter of the coal.
Fazlur Rahman Khan
1929–1982
The engineer who turned skyscrapers into tubes

Big ideaMake the outside walls do the work. A hollow tube resists wind far better than a frame of columns.
Emily Warren Roebling
1843–1903
The woman who carried the Brooklyn Bridge in her head

Big ideaCables pull, towers push. Give each material the job it is good at and you can hang a road across a river.
Wernher von Braun
1912–1977
The rocket builder who worked for two flags

Big ideaA rocket does not push against the air. It throws hot gas backward, and the gas throws the rocket forward.
George Stephenson
1781–1848
The pitman who could not read until he was eighteen

Big ideaReplace the big boiler flue with twenty-five small tubes and the fire gets about four times as much surface to heat the water.
Lillian Gilbreth
1878–1972
The mother of twelve who counted every step

Big ideaFilm a job, break it into its smallest motions, and throw away the ones that do nothing.
Sergei Korolev
1907–1966
The prisoner whose name was a state secret

Big ideaThrow something fast enough sideways and it falls around the Earth forever. That is an orbit.
John Smeaton
1724–1792
The man who built a lighthouse like an oak tree

Big ideaLock every stone into its neighbors and a tower of blocks becomes one solid thing that the sea cannot pull apart.
Hertha Ayrton
1854–1923
The woman who found out why the lights hissed

Big ideaSmall whirlpools of fluid can build the ripples on a beach, and she hoped well-aimed pulses of air could push lingering poison gas out of a trench or dugout.
Claude Shannon
1916–2001
The juggler who measured information

Big ideaEvery message, picture or song can be counted in yes-or-no answers. One answer is a bit.
Norbert Rillieux
1806–1894
The engineer who boiled sugar with used steam

Big ideaSteam rising off one boiling pan still carries almost all its heat. Catch it and use it to boil the next pan.
Henry Ford
1863–1947
The farm boy who made the work come to the worker

Big ideaKeep the worker still and move the car past him. Twelve and a half hours of assembly became ninety-three minutes.
Marc Isambard Brunel
1769–1849
The refugee who, the story goes, learned tunneling from a worm

Big ideaDig a little, line the hole behind you, push forward. A shipworm does it in wood; a shield does it under a river.
Granville Woods
1856–1910
The inventor who talked to a moving train

Big ideaA changing current in one wire stirs a current in a nearby wire without touching it. That gap can carry a message to a train at full speed.
Ellen Swallow Richards
1842–1911
The chemist who mapped a whole state’s dirty water

Big ideaSalt in a river tells you how far you are from the sea. Too much salt tells you someone’s sewage is in it.
Rudolf Diesel
1858–1913
The engine that lights its own fire, and the man who vanished at sea

Big ideaSqueeze air hard enough and it gets hot enough to set fuel alight by itself. The harder the squeeze, the less fuel is wasted.
Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya
1861–1962
The engineer whose birthday is Engineers’ Day

Big ideaA dam turns four months of monsoon into twelve months of water, and a gate can open itself with no one watching.
Lee de Forest
1873–1961
The man who put a gate in a beam of electrons

Big ideaA tiny voltage on a wire grid can throttle a large flow of electrons. A weak signal becomes a strong one.

Free sample

Read the opening of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s chapter

The first pages, word for word.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The engineer who believed bigger was cheaper

Lived: 1806–1859

Big idea: Double a ship’s size and its cargo grows eight times while its drag grows only about four. Build big.

On January 12, 1828, the Thames broke into the tunnel being dug beneath it. The resident engineer, a twenty-one-year-old named Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was swept off his feet by an immense wave of water. Six workers drowned. Brunel was carried up a shaft by the flood and pulled out alive, badly hurt. He was sent away to recover, first to the seaside at Brighton and then to Clifton, near Bristol.

In 1829, Bristol announced a competition for a bridge across the Avon Gorge, a chasm with a river seventy-five meters below. Brunel entered. His design was chosen in 1831. It was the beginning of a career in which almost nothing he built was ordinary, and almost everything was larger than anyone had tried before.

The father’s son

Brunel’s father, Marc, was a French engineer who had fled the Revolution and settled in England. He gave the boy his own middle name, Isambard, to go with his mother’s family name, Kingdom, taught him drawing and geometry at home, and sent him to school in France. There Isambard studied under Breguet, one of the most famous clockmakers in Paris, learning how precise a machine could be. Then he came home to work for his father in the mud under the Thames.

The tunnel was Marc’s great project, but it taught the son something that stayed with him. Water, rock and money all have to be managed at once. When the tunnel flooded, the company ran out of cash and the works stopped for about seven years. Brunel never forgot that an engineer who ignores the budget soon has no project at all.

The chapter goes on. So do 19 more.

Paperback

From the book

See it, try it, think about it

Side view of a suspension bridge with arrows: cables in tension (pulling), towers in compression (pushing down), vertical hangers holding the deck, anchorages at each end — The cables pull, the towers push, and the road simply hangs.Illustration from the chapter on Emily Warren Roebling

Try this

Hold an empty drink can by its ends and try to bend it. Now ask an adult to cut a strip of the same aluminum from another can (the cut edges are sharp, so wear gloves), hold it flat and bend it. Same metal, same thickness. The can resists because its metal is far from the center line of the bend. Many of Khan’s tallest buildings are that can, standing on end.

Try this

Blow up a balloon and let it go. The air rushes out the back and the balloon shoots forward, in a vacuum or not. Now sit on a skateboard on a smooth, flat floor and throw a heavy bag of books away from you. You roll the other way. You have just built a rocket, with the bag as exhaust.

First lines

How other chapters begin

In May 1883, shortly before the president of the United States came to open it, a carriage rolled onto the new bridge across the East River.

On the night of October 4, 1957, a polished metal ball the size of a beach ball, with four long whip antennas, separated from the top of a rocket launched from Kazakhstan and began to circle the Earth once every ninety-six minutes.

In a kitchen around 1930, a woman set out to make a strawberry shortcake and every step she took was counted.

In the 1880s, one of the deadliest things about a railway was that nobody could talk to a train once it had left the station.

Paperback

Questions

About Extraordinary Engineers

Which engineers are in the book?

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Gustave Eiffel, James Watt, Fazlur Rahman Khan, Emily Warren Roebling, Wernher von Braun, George Stephenson, Lillian Gilbreth, Sergei Korolev, John Smeaton, Hertha Ayrton, Claude Shannon, Norbert Rillieux, Henry Ford, Marc Isambard Brunel, Granville Woods, Ellen Swallow Richards, Rudolf Diesel, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya and Lee de Forest: 20 in all.

Is it only about bridges and buildings?

No. Alongside towers, bridges, tunnels and railways, the book covers steam and diesel engines, rockets and orbits, radio, the assembly line, clean water and the bit, the unit of information.

Do I need to read the other Famous in STEM books first?

No. Extraordinary Engineers is Volume 7 of seven, and every volume stands on its own. Each chapter does too, so readers can start with whoever interests them most.

What age is it for?