The history of science is often seen as a story of advancement but nothing could be further from the truth. Justin Pollard fills us in on Isaac Newton, who thought gravity was created by the Holy Spirit, how eleven people claimed to have invented the steam engine, and why the first website was 12 foot across and made of wood.

Since the autumn of 2007 Justin Pollard's Eccentric Engineer column in the award-winning E&T magazine has been campaigning to remind engineers of the extraordinary role that their subject has played in human history. This book gathers together three years of those musings, highlighting not simply the most famous engineering tales but the unusual, the erratic, and occasionally the patently insane.

In its fifty stories it covers everything from aircraft carriers made of ice, to the origins of the omnibus. We'll toy with Roman turbines, and Greek computers, look at Renaissance...