History for Kids: The Lives of Archimedes and Leonardo Da Vinci

By: Charles River Editors

Narrated by: Tracey Norman

Length: 38 mins

Publisher's summary

In Charles River Editors' History for Kids series, your children can learn about history's most important people and events in an easy, entertaining, and educational way.

Over 1500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci became the Renaissance man, antiquity had its own in the form of Archimedes, one of the most famous ancient Greeks. An engineer, mathematician, physicist, scientist, and astronomer all rolled into one, Archimedes has been credited for making groundbreaking discoveries, some of which are undoubtedly fact and others that are almost certainly myth. Regardless, he's considered the first man to determine a way to measure an object's mass, and also the first man to realize that refracting the sun's light could burn something, theorizing the existence of lasers over two millennia before they existed. People still use the design of the Archimedes screw in water pumps today, and modern scholars have tried to link him to the recently discovered Antikythera mechanism, an ancient "computer" of sorts that used mechanics to accurately chart astronomical data depending on the date it was set to.

It has long been difficult to separate fact from legend in the story of Archimedes' life, from his death to his legendary discovery of how to differentiate gold from fool's gold, but many of his works survived antiquity, and many others were quoted by other ancient writers. As a result, even while his life and death remain topics of debate, his writings and measurements are factually established and well known, and they range on everything from measuring an object's density to measuring circles and parabolas.

©2013 Charles River Editors (P)2017 Charles River Editors

Basic information

The biographies of these two men were very short and did not give much detail to Archimedes war time inventions. Information a kid might find intriguing.

Hands down biggest waste

We only listened to Archimedes, but it differed enough from every other source that I would not trust these editors. Stick with books whose authors are known.